My latest: lots of laws. No guts.

This week, a mob attacked a hospital.

Not because they support Palestine.  They did it because they hate Jews.

Mount Sinai Hospital, on University Avenue in Toronto, isn’t “Jewish,” of course, any more than it is Protestant or Catholic or Muslim.  This writer’s sons were all born there, delivered by a former medic in the IDF who hummed along to John Cougar Mellencamp songs.

Nobody asked us about our religion while we were there. But Mount Sinai is indeed an important symbol for the 1.4 per cent of the Canadian population who are Jews.  Which is why the haters descended on the place on Monday night, to promote hatred.

Like snakes, spewing venom.

Mount Sinai was created 102 years ago, when some Jewish women started fundraising for a hospital – because, among other things, no other Toronto hospital would allow Jews to practice medicine.  Along with the lives regularly bettered or saved there, Mount Sinai delivers 7,000 babies every year.

You’ve likely heard about the attack on Mount Sinai Hospital because it woke up quite a few politicians from their extended slumber.  Many of them had been asleep, or the political equivalent, during previous attacks on Jewish symbols in this country.

But Mount Sinai woke them up.  Was it the mob screaming for “intifada” – a terror campaign? Was it the masked “pro-Palestinian” types climbing scaffolding affixed to the hospital’s front, waving flags, blocking peoples’ access? You know: people who were there to be admitted as patients.  The people there to get help in the Emergency Department.  The people there for cancer treatment.  Or to just have a baby.

Was it that? Who knows.  Whatever it was, the politicians woke up.  The Prime Minister, for once, called it “anti-Semitism,” and didn’t feel the need to tuck “islamophobia” into the subclause that followed.

Ontario’s Premier, who has been consistently more vocal than most, called the attack on the hospital “indecent,” because it was.  Toronto’s mayor, who previously advocated for a ceasefire – even when the anti-Israel mob was terrorizing her New Year’s family skate party – also said it was anti-Semitic.  Fine.

So, where were the police?  Good question.

There are no shortage of laws available to charge the thugs who attacked Mount Sinai Hospital this week.  There is, apparently, a shortage of police.

Reportedly, there were only two (2) on hand to deal with a parade of hundreds of thugs who were easily observed several blocks away, for many minutes, banging drums and chanting “initifada.”  Police headquarters is 850 metres away, a four-minute walk.  But the Toronto Police Service could only muster two (2) officers to deal with law-breaking on a mass scale.

And, rest assured: it was all illegal.  A new law, which Premier Ford emphasized on Tuesday, is seen in Bill C-3, and is specifically designed to protect hospitals and the people who work in them.  The Bill seeks to prevent precisely the sort of hatefest that took place on University Avenue on Monday night.  If indicted, those who violate the new law can face ten years in prison.

But that is not the only law available to police and prosecutors for the siege of Mt. Sinai.  Here are some others, with the relevant sections of the Criminal Code, for officers to tuck into their wallets for future reference:

•blocking or obstructing a highway (Section 423(1)(g))
•intimidation (Section 423(1))
•causing a disturbance (Section 175)
•common nuisance (Section 180)
•interfering with transportation facilities (Section 248)
•breach of the peace or imminent breach (Section 31)
•riots (Sections 32, 33, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69)
•unlawful assembly (Section 63)
•mischief (Section 430)

It goes without saying that it is crime to simply attempt or conspire to do any of those things.  And, that’s not all: if one of the thugs was wearing a mask while committing an offence – and masks were in widespread use Monday night – section 65(2) of the Criminal Code makes that an offence, as well.  And can also, if indicted, result in a decade behind bars.

So, lots of laws are available to prevent another attack on Mount Sinai Hospital, or any other hospital.  Or any place or person, really.

We have the laws.  In this country, we have many, many laws we can use.

What we don’t have, increasingly, is the guts to use them.


Who will lead us?

Vandalism, blocking public roads, and acts of intimidation are all criminal offences. Wearing a mask while doing any of those things is another criminal offence. There is no shortage of laws on the books to deal with this madness.

What we lack is leadership.


My latest: why Israel will win the war

The late, great Sunday Times writer Marie Colvin said it best:  war correspondents send back the first draft of history.

Colvin was assassinated by the Syrian regime in 2012. She, more than most, knew how difficult it is to ascertain the truth in the chaos and wreckage of wartime. The first casualty of war is indeed truth, as everyone knows.

During Israel’s overdue and righteous war against the murderous cult that is Hamas, many re-learned this lesson the hard way.  Remember that hospital in Gaza, the one that Israel supposedly destroyed back in October, purportedly killing 500 innocent Palestinians in the process?

Well, they didn’t. Destroy the hospital or kill 500 people. The hospital is still standing, and 500 bodies have yet to be produced by the Hamas-controlled health authority. However, no less than The New York Times blamed Israel on its front page, under a screaming headline.

And they were wrong. As the Times was subsequently forced to admit: “[Our] coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”

“Incorrect” is a bit of an understatement. When you wrongly accuse a country of a massive war crime in your front page, you need to clearly and unambiguously apologize.

You also need to do something else: not ever take the word of Hamas. In particular, don’t take the word of Hamas, or its agencies, when assessing what is happening in the war in Gaza.

Edward N. Luttwak didn’t. Luttwak has been a war correspondent and soldier himself. In a piece published this week in Tablet magazine, Luttwak carefully analyzed Israel’s conduct of the war so far. His conclusion:

“Israel’s very innovative methods to surveil, penetrate, and destroy Hamas tunnels have been markedly and unexpectedly successful. But the constraints placed on Israel’s combat operations have been very severe, and a major impediment to its fight.”

Among those constraints, of course, is that Israel is always held to a different standard. The aforementioned Syrian regime can slaughter 110,000 Muslims in 2015, many of them children, and the keffiyah-clad Gen Z protestors in the West won’t chant a thing. About Israel, of course, they’ll scream bloody murder.

And that’s even when murder has not taken place. As Luttwak writes, “The Israeli army remains wedded to the British method of intensive and prolonged individual instruction for its soldiers before their in-unit training, so that nobody enters Gaza without at least a full year’s worth of combat instruction, much more than their American counterparts had in Vietnam.”

That has kept Israeli troop casualties to a shockingly small number: less than 300. Says Luttwak: “Not in the thousands suggested by the beribboned skeptics who were gleefully echoed by the malevolent, but under 300 as of this writing. In other words, only a very, very small number, given the magnitude of the forces involved on both sides, and the exceptional complexity of the battlefield.”

Nor does Luttwak accept the wild numbers coming out of Hamas when calculating civilian deaths: “Contrary to accusations that only expensively educated U.S. college students could possibly believe, Israeli soldiers do not deliberately kill innocent civilians going about their business.”

Meanwhile, he says, thousands of trained Hamas fighters have been slain. The Israeli battlefield victories have been “exceptional,” he says.

How has Israel accomplished all of this? Three ways, he says.

One, Israeli troops did not simply charge into the maze of Hamas tunnels, which are reportedly longer than the London tube system.  Before these Israelis enter the tunnels, they are under orders to await the go-ahead of the Yahalom combat engineer unit, who are experts in tunnel warfare.

Two, the Israelis have been making use of technology that has protected them and civilians in a crowded urban environment. Their combat vehicles, for example, are nimble and more protective than any in history. Meanwhile, their drones – “remotely piloted vehicles, “as the Israelis first called them, and which the Israelis essentially invented 60 years ago – ensure that they target only Hamas, and not civilians.

Three, there is the culture and mindset of the troops themselves. To a one, Luttwak says, they have been trained to keep “fighting as hard and as long as necessary to grind down Hamas until nothing is left of its fighting strength.”

So, is victory at hand? Is the the war, which has cost the lives of many on both sides, almost over?

For the answer to that, my colleague Brian Lilley interviewed Eylon Levy, an official spokesman for the Israeli government. (Their encounter will be on this week’s Postmedia podcast.)

Asked how the war is going, Levy was succinct:

“For us, from day one, it has been very clear why we are fighting. We are fighting to bring the Hamas terror regime to justice, so that it can never again perpetrate again an atrocity like October 7, and to bring back the hostages” he says.

“We are fighting for humanity. And anything less than a total victory will be a terrible danger to the whole free world.”

And that is the truth.


My latest: memo to Biden campaign

 

By now, all of you have received the pre-release report of Robert K. Hur, the Special Counsel who was appointed by the United States Attorney General to investigate how classified documents were found in the Delaware home of the President.

We have two days to develop a war room response to the report. That is all.

It should be said the report contains one helpful result. It concludes that no charges should be brought against President Biden: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur wrote.

But that will not be the focus of the media and the Trump campaign. Their focus will be these words in Hur’s report:

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

And: that the President could not recall when his son Beau died, that he has “limited memory” about key events, and could not recall the years he was Vice-President in the Obama administration.

These characterizations of the President are an unmitigated disaster. We have been given two days. If we do not use those two days to our advantage, we will have legitimized the main weakness of our campaign, which has always been the President’s mental fitness for the job.

There are five things we must do, now.

One, destroy the Special Counsel’s credibility. Robert K. Hur is a registered Republican. He is not a medical doctor, nor does he have any experience whatsoever in diagnosing for mental deficiencies. He is, in fact, a long-time donor to multiple Republican candidates. In addition, he was active in the Trump White House, even appearing at Trump-era events.

As a lawyer, Hur clerked for a Ninth Circuit judge who sexually harassed and abused more than a dozen female law clerks and staffers. Right now, we need to depict him as a Republican hack, one who worked in the Trump White House, and one who worked alongside GOP creeps.

Two: the Special Counsel violated the rules. With his report, Hur has practiced medicine without a licence to do so. The Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers in America are clear: a lawyer is not permitted to engage in “deceit or misrepresentation” – here, pretending to be a doctor.

That is not all: the Goldwater Rule. Sixty years ago, Democratic operatives attacked the mental stability of the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Thereafter, the American Psychological Association said: “It is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” If it is unethical for a psychologist to pronounce on a politician’s mental acuity, it is even worse for an unqualified partisan hack to do so.

Three: we need to provide clear evidence Hur is wrong. The allegation about his deceased son will enrage the President, and understandably so. It is disgusting for anyone to say that to a father about a son who predeceased him.

But we cannot let the President do any press encounters when he is angry. We cannot let any verbal mishaps between now and November. There is no room for error. And it is not enough to say that Trump is also mentally deficient, and regularly makes mistakes: his vote base hold him to a lower standard in every way. Saying that Trump is worse will make no difference.

Four: saturate the airwaves with our messaging. In the main, we need to (a) rally the troops, who will be understandably dispirited by Hur’s report, and (b) attack, attack, attack. We must be relentless, pointing out to Independents Trump’s many mistakes – getting wrong world leaders, getting countries wrong – and leave no breathing room for Republican proxies to push Hur’s narrative.

We may not win, but we need to turn this mess into a wash.

Five: we need to prepare for none of the above to happen. If we do not take advantage of the advance warning we have been given, we will have likely torpedoed victory in November. If the Republicans do not argue for removal of the President under the 25th Amendment, it’ll be a miracle.

If we do not move fast, the President will have been mortally wounded. And we will need to start considering succession.

Now.

[Kinsella ran multiple successful war rooms for Jean Chretien, Dalton McGuinty and others. He also volunteered on the 2020 Biden campaign.]


What I’m noticing

Noticing that there are fewer stories about Israel’s just and proper war against Hamas. Factors:

• war fatigue
• Israel has won it
• the majority are happy Israel won it

Attention will now turn the anti-Semitism that has appeared everywhere.

That battle will take longer.


My latest: Belleville’s problem is everyone’s problem

BELLEVILLE – Brian Orford is a Belleville native, age 44. He looks a lot older than that. He looks profoundly sad, like he’s seen it all.

He probably has.

Brian knows the streets, here, and he knows the people who live on the streets. He knows, too, all of the 17 people who overdosed over a 24-hour period this week.

People figure they all overdosed on the same batch of opiate – but possibly with GHB mixed in. The date rape drug. There’s talk of tranq dope heading this way, too. That’s the scary one, the one that causes addicts to lose fingers and toes.

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

It is. Nine had to be rushed to the Belleville hospital Tuesday night, to literally save their lives. They overdosed right out front, Brian says, along the grimy wall at the John Howard Society drop-in centre in the bottom of the United Church on Bridge Street. They are all his friends, he says.

When that happened, the city of Belleville issued an extraordinary warning to the public. They actually warned people to stay away from Belleville’s downtown core. For safety reasons.

Like it was a war zone. Which, these days, it kind of is.

Brian Orford says that big cities are sending the homeless and the drug-addicted to smaller towns like Belleville. To make them someone else’s problem. He’s not the only one saying it, either.

“There’s been two or three buses,” Brian says. “They get offered a free lunch and the bus takes them here.”

It’s happened two or three times in the past few months that he knows about, he says. “It’s people other places can’t handle,” he says. “But there’s so many people here already. And there’s no resources.”

Staff who work with the homeless in Belleville – staff who don’t want to be named – confirm what Brian says. They nod their heads. They’ve heard it too: big cities like Toronto are dumping their homeless and drug-addiction problems on smaller cities like Belleville.

There’s the talk of blue buses slipping into town at night, and dropping off bewildered people on cold and lonely sidewalks.

“We’ve all heard that,” says one. “The buses are coming from other places, like Toronto and Ottawa.”

Down the block from where the overdoses happened, the city’s mayor and chief of police – and a posse of other officials – are holding a press conference. The mayor is Neil Ellis, an affable straight-shooter who used to be a Member of Parliament.

Asked about the rumors about big cities dropping off homeless and addicted people in Belleville, Ellis doesn’t dodge or weave. About 66 per cent of the homeless in the area are from the area, he says. “But the homeless don’t vote,” he cautions. So they’re not entirely sure.

Ellis doesn’t confirm that people are being dumped here. But he doesn’t deny it, either. “This problem is front and centre for every community in Canada,” he says. And the federal and provincial governments need to do a lot more, he adds.

His chief of police, Mike Callaghan, nods his head vigorously. He, too, says Ottawa and Queen’s Park have been mostly AWOL. Callaghan hasn’t been able to hire new police officers for years – while Belleville has been growing by leaps and bounds.

A few blocks North of City Hall, the Grace Inn is one of the few places around that can offer a bed to a homeless person. And it’s been completely full since it opened, just before the pandemic – there’s only a couple dozen beds, while Belleville has a homeless population of at least 200. (And full disclosure: this writer has donated to the Grace Inn in the past.)

Jodie Jenkins, the impressive chair of the Grace Inn, says he has heard “for a while now” that homeless and addicted people are being dumped in Belleville. But, he says, “based on our data specific to the shelter, it doesn’t line up. Almost 80 per cent of our guests at the shelter are from the immediate and surrounding area.”

So, stories about mysterious blue buses dropping broken people onto Belleville’s sidewalks at night will remain that for now – stories. And, when you think about it, it doesn’t matter.

Because, as Mayor Neil Ellis says, the problem is everywhere. And moving it from one city to another doesn’t change the reality.

And the reality is this: the problem keeps coming back, everywhere.

And it keeps getting worse.