If a mime falls in the forest, does he/she make a sound?
The answer is "Yes." And the sound is usually "Shit!" Or possibly "Goddammit!"
Trudeau announces Amira Elghawaby as Canada's first representative to combat Islamophobia
- Thread starter The_Foxer
- Start date
The answer is "Yes." And the sound is usually "Shit!" Or possibly "Goddammit!"
While the Canadian anti-Israel movement has always had extremist rhetoric at its core, the last few weeks have witnessed a notable escalation in tactics, with demonstrators now attacking police, openly waving the flags of listed terror organizations and even calling for the destruction of Canada itself.
On Monday, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante slammed the “unacceptable” behaviour of a Sunday anti-Israel protest in which participants broke windows and threw makeshift firebombs at police.
A group of around 60 protesters moved through the Montreal core on Sunday night, breaking windows, setting off fireworks and spray-painting graffiti that appears to spell the word “complicit.”
“When officers were chasing some protesters, two Molotov cocktails were thrown in the direction of police. They didn’t hit them,” police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant told The Montreal Gazette.
A videographer with the anarchist group Clash MTL uploaded footage of the crowd, dressed all in black and carrying a banner reading “L’espoir c’est la lute” (Hope is struggle). “A demo for Palestine attacked Concordia University Sunday evening. Many windows of luxury stores on Sainte-Catherine street were also broken. The police were kept at a distance with the help of molotov cocktails,” read a Clash MTL caption.
In Downtown Toronto on Saturday, a demonstration featured multiple participants carrying the flag of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which Canada officially lists as a terror entity.
That protest was carried live on Press TV, the English-language state media outlet of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Correspondent Firas Al-Najim stood in front of a masked man waving a Hezbollah flag in the middle of a Toronto street and said that Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group only because of the “Zionist lobby’s” influence in Canada.
Throughout the broadcast, bicycle-mounted Toronto Police can be seen moving amid the Hezbollah flags. At one point, Al-Najim even gestures to an officer, saying, “we’re cooperating with the police.”
Photographer Yasmine El-Sabawi publicized photos of demonstrators at the Toronto protest clad in masks and carrying portraits of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed on Friday by an Israeli air strike. In one of El-Sabawi’s images, a woman can be seen wearing a green headband similar to the type typically associated with Hamas.
“Long live legal armed resistance to occupation” read a large banner carried at the demonstration. The banner included an inverted red triangle; a symbol glorifying violence against Israel. Its use has been popularized in videos released by Hamas’ military wing, in which the triangle is used to mark Israeli targets.
Nasrallah’s death was widely mourned by many of the central players in the Canadian anti-Israel cause, including by Samidoun, a Vancouver-based non-profit with direct ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an active Gazan terrorist group.
“We express our deepest mourning & our highest salutes to the great leader, the martyr, inspiration of so many around the world, symbol & strategist of resistance, tireless anti-imperialist, anti-colonial liberator, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” read an official statement by Samidoun.
apple.news
Samidoun co-founder Khaled Barakat has been recorded in livestreams referring to members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “friends and brothers.”
Although he has been a frequent participant in Vancouver anti-Israel rallies (one of which featured him declaring “long live October 7”) Barakat is currently in Lebanon. In a recent press release from Beirut, Barakat praised the “heroic resistance” of Hezbollah and claimed “the resistance will be victorious.”
The Ahlul Bayt Mosque in Windsor, Ont. also advertised a Sunday event to “commemorate the martyrdom” of “The Great Martyr Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.” Although, as of Tuesday, the Instagram link promoting the event is no longer active.
The day before the Toronto pro-Hezbollah demonstration, roads around a Jewish neighbourhood in Ottawa were blockaded by keffiyeh-wearing crowds setting off smoke bombs and issuing Arabic chants for Israel’s destruction.
Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman highlighted the gathering in an X.com post, writing “this is outside a Jewish seniors home in Ottawa. Not a consulate or an embassy. Not a government building. Not a politician’s office. A Jewish seniors home.”
The ostensible reason for the demonstration was that a nearby Jewish community centre had been holding a presentation for Sar-El, an organization that recruits volunteers to work logistical roles with the Israel Defense Forces. Sar-El’s Canadian branch is a registered non-profit.
Nevertheless, anti-Israel organizers falsely claimed the event was “illegal” and marshalled several hundred demonstrators to completely block access to the surrounding Jewish neighbourhood, which did indeed include a seniors centre.
The Ottawa blockade came just one day after a Parliament Hill protest in which anti-Israel demonstrators called for Canada’s destruction. Video captured from a protest livestream and uploaded to X.com by a user going by the name “Leviathan” shows a masked demonstrator leading the crowd in a chant calling for Canada’s end.
“We will continue fighting until the Zionist entity crumbles along with its accomplice the United States and this country crumbles to the ground, we will win,” he says, prompting an extended chant of “we will win” from the crowd.
Next week, there are events planned across Canada to celebrate the October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, in which Hamas gunmen murdered more than 1,200 Israeli civilians.
This includes a Samidoun-organized event outside the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled “Al-Aqsa Flood” — the official name of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
A Toronto event has been billed as “One Year of Genocide. One Year of Resistance.” As per an official Instagram promotion, “this October marks one year since our people in Gaza showed the world that the Palestinian people will continue to resist their continued displacement and dispossession by their colonizer.”
I wonder where Amira Elghawaby (as Canada's first representative to combat Islamophobia) stands on the above and what she would have to say if she was allowed to say anything at this point???
On Monday, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante slammed the “unacceptable” behaviour of a Sunday anti-Israel protest in which participants broke windows and threw makeshift firebombs at police.
A group of around 60 protesters moved through the Montreal core on Sunday night, breaking windows, setting off fireworks and spray-painting graffiti that appears to spell the word “complicit.”
“When officers were chasing some protesters, two Molotov cocktails were thrown in the direction of police. They didn’t hit them,” police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant told The Montreal Gazette.
A videographer with the anarchist group Clash MTL uploaded footage of the crowd, dressed all in black and carrying a banner reading “L’espoir c’est la lute” (Hope is struggle). “A demo for Palestine attacked Concordia University Sunday evening. Many windows of luxury stores on Sainte-Catherine street were also broken. The police were kept at a distance with the help of molotov cocktails,” read a Clash MTL caption.
In Downtown Toronto on Saturday, a demonstration featured multiple participants carrying the flag of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which Canada officially lists as a terror entity.
That protest was carried live on Press TV, the English-language state media outlet of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Correspondent Firas Al-Najim stood in front of a masked man waving a Hezbollah flag in the middle of a Toronto street and said that Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group only because of the “Zionist lobby’s” influence in Canada.
Throughout the broadcast, bicycle-mounted Toronto Police can be seen moving amid the Hezbollah flags. At one point, Al-Najim even gestures to an officer, saying, “we’re cooperating with the police.”
Photographer Yasmine El-Sabawi publicized photos of demonstrators at the Toronto protest clad in masks and carrying portraits of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed on Friday by an Israeli air strike. In one of El-Sabawi’s images, a woman can be seen wearing a green headband similar to the type typically associated with Hamas.
“Long live legal armed resistance to occupation” read a large banner carried at the demonstration. The banner included an inverted red triangle; a symbol glorifying violence against Israel. Its use has been popularized in videos released by Hamas’ military wing, in which the triangle is used to mark Israeli targets.
Nasrallah’s death was widely mourned by many of the central players in the Canadian anti-Israel cause, including by Samidoun, a Vancouver-based non-profit with direct ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an active Gazan terrorist group.
“We express our deepest mourning & our highest salutes to the great leader, the martyr, inspiration of so many around the world, symbol & strategist of resistance, tireless anti-imperialist, anti-colonial liberator, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” read an official statement by Samidoun.
FIRST READING: Canadian anti-Israel protests reaching new thresholds of extremism — National Post
Firebombs, waving the flags of listed terror organizations, calls for violence and the destruction of Canada
Although he has been a frequent participant in Vancouver anti-Israel rallies (one of which featured him declaring “long live October 7”) Barakat is currently in Lebanon. In a recent press release from Beirut, Barakat praised the “heroic resistance” of Hezbollah and claimed “the resistance will be victorious.”
The Ahlul Bayt Mosque in Windsor, Ont. also advertised a Sunday event to “commemorate the martyrdom” of “The Great Martyr Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.” Although, as of Tuesday, the Instagram link promoting the event is no longer active.
The day before the Toronto pro-Hezbollah demonstration, roads around a Jewish neighbourhood in Ottawa were blockaded by keffiyeh-wearing crowds setting off smoke bombs and issuing Arabic chants for Israel’s destruction.
Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman highlighted the gathering in an X.com post, writing “this is outside a Jewish seniors home in Ottawa. Not a consulate or an embassy. Not a government building. Not a politician’s office. A Jewish seniors home.”
The ostensible reason for the demonstration was that a nearby Jewish community centre had been holding a presentation for Sar-El, an organization that recruits volunteers to work logistical roles with the Israel Defense Forces. Sar-El’s Canadian branch is a registered non-profit.
Nevertheless, anti-Israel organizers falsely claimed the event was “illegal” and marshalled several hundred demonstrators to completely block access to the surrounding Jewish neighbourhood, which did indeed include a seniors centre.
The Ottawa blockade came just one day after a Parliament Hill protest in which anti-Israel demonstrators called for Canada’s destruction. Video captured from a protest livestream and uploaded to X.com by a user going by the name “Leviathan” shows a masked demonstrator leading the crowd in a chant calling for Canada’s end.
“We will continue fighting until the Zionist entity crumbles along with its accomplice the United States and this country crumbles to the ground, we will win,” he says, prompting an extended chant of “we will win” from the crowd.
Next week, there are events planned across Canada to celebrate the October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, in which Hamas gunmen murdered more than 1,200 Israeli civilians.
This includes a Samidoun-organized event outside the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled “Al-Aqsa Flood” — the official name of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
A Toronto event has been billed as “One Year of Genocide. One Year of Resistance.” As per an official Instagram promotion, “this October marks one year since our people in Gaza showed the world that the Palestinian people will continue to resist their continued displacement and dispossession by their colonizer.”
I wonder where Amira Elghawaby (as Canada's first representative to combat Islamophobia) stands on the above and what she would have to say if she was allowed to say anything at this point???
Police in several cities to increase presence ahead of Oct. 7 anniversary — CTV News
On the anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks in Israel, police departments in cities across Canada are increasing their presence in Jewish and Muslim communities, as well as at the locations of planned protests.
Deborah Lyons: October 7 an opportunity to redouble our efforts against hate — National Post
The fact that people are celebrating on this solemn anniversary shows how deeply entrenched antisemitism has become
Canadians divided by age and political leanings in support for Israel versus Hamas: poll — National Post
Support for Israel among the respondents did not translate into support for Zionism
On Saturday, a self-proclaimed journalist named Samira Mohyeddin posted on X that “tens of thousands” of people were marching in Toronto to mark the one-year anniversary of “Israel’s relentless bombardment and genocide” in Gaza. The new journalism fellow at the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute, and former producer of CBC’s The Current, made no mention of what had prompted the “relentless bombardment.”
I can’t presume to speak to Mohyeddin’s personal politics, but her post reflects the view held by a distressingly large number of young Canadians.
A new Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies suggests one in five 18-24-year-olds support Hamas over Israel. Some of those young people have roots in the region, but the majority have bought into the settler colonialism social theory. It not only questions the right of Israel to exist but also proposes that countries like Canada and the United States are illegitimate, and that all non-Indigenous people are usurpers.
If you accept that idea, it does not take a great leap of faith to believe that all political action should be aimed at avenging past injustices.
Since mass decolonization in North America is not a realistic option, the focus has shifted to a “live” struggle — that between the “Indigenous” Palestinian people and the Jewish European “colonizers.”
In this light, violence is a necessary means to an end.
apple.news
As Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of a new book called On Settler Colonialism, put it in a recent Munk Debate interview: “People who have protested the killing of Palestinian civilians are actually very excited about the killing of Israeli civilians” as part of a colonial struggle.
That the settler colonial model is an ill-fit for what is more accurately a clash of two national movements carries little weight with young progressives who accept the paradigm uncritically. To them, Western civilization is an invasion and has no right to exist.
The exhausted majority is forced to watch impotently as the nation’s streets and campuses are seized by the mob dynamics of a noisy, illiberal minority.
B’nai Brith, the Jewish community organization, recorded a 109 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents last year, the worst on record. Violence against Jews increased more than 200 per cent.
It is a grim picture, except for the fact that law enforcement seems belatedly to be getting its act together.
Toronto Police noted a spike in hate crimes in 2023 but only made arrests in 18 per cent of cases.
Its figures for the first half of 2024 suggest the number of incidents that led to arrests has risen to around one third.
The country’s largest municipal police force arrested two men for carrying Hezbollah flags last week. Given Hezbollah is a listed terrorist entity, the men were charged with public incitement of hatred. Canada has laws against advocating genocide (section 318 of the Criminal Code), public incitement of hatred (section 319-1) and wilful promotion of hatred (section 319-2), but they have been used sparingly because of freedom of speech concerns.
That’s as it should be. But we have strayed from freedom of expression into terrain where rape and murder are lionized as legitimate tactics.
Section 318 and 319-2 require the consent of the Attorney General to lay charges, complicating any prosecution.
This led B’nai Brith and two other Jewish organizations to write to the justice minister, Arif Virani earlier this month to call for him to bring forward new legislation to criminalize the glorification of terrorism. In particular, they asked him to prohibit the public waving of the flags of banned terror organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
That may prove less urgent if the existing legislation can be used by police forces.
But Canada should still modernize its anti-hate laws to prevent a repetition of the disgraceful scenes in Mississauga, Ont., last October 7, when a joyous crowd honked horns and cheered the news from Israel, as if they had just won the World Cup.
The B’nai Brith letter noted that other countries like France and Britain have such anti-glorification legislation but Canada has yet to take this step.
“The absence of such laws allows individuals to promote and celebrate terrorist ideologies without facing legal repercussions,” it said. “The oversight is corrosive to public order and serves to enable those who seek to radicalize others and perpetuate hatred in our communities.”
That is an important point. The Leger poll suggests that older Canadians are far less likely to support Hamas.
Younger Canadians may yet grow out of their reckless and misguided support for settler colonialism, but only if they don’t become radicalized in the meantime.
I can’t presume to speak to Mohyeddin’s personal politics, but her post reflects the view held by a distressingly large number of young Canadians.
A new Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies suggests one in five 18-24-year-olds support Hamas over Israel. Some of those young people have roots in the region, but the majority have bought into the settler colonialism social theory. It not only questions the right of Israel to exist but also proposes that countries like Canada and the United States are illegitimate, and that all non-Indigenous people are usurpers.
If you accept that idea, it does not take a great leap of faith to believe that all political action should be aimed at avenging past injustices.
Since mass decolonization in North America is not a realistic option, the focus has shifted to a “live” struggle — that between the “Indigenous” Palestinian people and the Jewish European “colonizers.”
In this light, violence is a necessary means to an end.
John Ivison: We have strayed from freedom of expression into terrain where rape and murder are lionized — National Post
Younger Canadians show a reckless and misguided support for the settler colonialism theory
That the settler colonial model is an ill-fit for what is more accurately a clash of two national movements carries little weight with young progressives who accept the paradigm uncritically. To them, Western civilization is an invasion and has no right to exist.
The exhausted majority is forced to watch impotently as the nation’s streets and campuses are seized by the mob dynamics of a noisy, illiberal minority.
B’nai Brith, the Jewish community organization, recorded a 109 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents last year, the worst on record. Violence against Jews increased more than 200 per cent.
It is a grim picture, except for the fact that law enforcement seems belatedly to be getting its act together.
Toronto Police noted a spike in hate crimes in 2023 but only made arrests in 18 per cent of cases.
Its figures for the first half of 2024 suggest the number of incidents that led to arrests has risen to around one third.
The country’s largest municipal police force arrested two men for carrying Hezbollah flags last week. Given Hezbollah is a listed terrorist entity, the men were charged with public incitement of hatred. Canada has laws against advocating genocide (section 318 of the Criminal Code), public incitement of hatred (section 319-1) and wilful promotion of hatred (section 319-2), but they have been used sparingly because of freedom of speech concerns.
That’s as it should be. But we have strayed from freedom of expression into terrain where rape and murder are lionized as legitimate tactics.
Section 318 and 319-2 require the consent of the Attorney General to lay charges, complicating any prosecution.
This led B’nai Brith and two other Jewish organizations to write to the justice minister, Arif Virani earlier this month to call for him to bring forward new legislation to criminalize the glorification of terrorism. In particular, they asked him to prohibit the public waving of the flags of banned terror organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
That may prove less urgent if the existing legislation can be used by police forces.
But Canada should still modernize its anti-hate laws to prevent a repetition of the disgraceful scenes in Mississauga, Ont., last October 7, when a joyous crowd honked horns and cheered the news from Israel, as if they had just won the World Cup.
The B’nai Brith letter noted that other countries like France and Britain have such anti-glorification legislation but Canada has yet to take this step.
“The absence of such laws allows individuals to promote and celebrate terrorist ideologies without facing legal repercussions,” it said. “The oversight is corrosive to public order and serves to enable those who seek to radicalize others and perpetuate hatred in our communities.”
That is an important point. The Leger poll suggests that older Canadians are far less likely to support Hamas.
Younger Canadians may yet grow out of their reckless and misguided support for settler colonialism, but only if they don’t become radicalized in the meantime.
Saturday was not even the 1 year anniversary of the attack on Israel much less the retaliation.
Horseshoes and hand grenades, perhaps scud missiles, and various other things of the indiscriminate.
Both attacks were retaliation. Oct 7 built up from the Zionist attacks on the West Bank with Huwara being exceptionally heated. If only we saw both side but theres a cover up going on.
‘Repugnant’: US rebukes Israeli remark on Palestinian village
US State Department condemns Israeli minister’s call for Huwara to be ‘wiped out’, calling it a ‘disgusting’ incitement.
Meanwhile the Israelis we think we support dont support what you support.
Or retaliation for Israel existing on land that at any point was Muslim controlled, ‘cuz that’s not Allowed in an Ummah irredentism sorta way.
Ummah - Wikipedia
The reason why the Arab world, and the Muslim-Arab world in particular, find Israel categorically unacceptable goes back to the doctrine of Dar al Harb, Dar al Islam. The land between the river and sea became a key part of the exploding Arab-Muslim empire – Dar al Islam – in the 7thcentury.
Fast forward some 14 centuries, and the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924 (the first ‘Nakba’) put an end to Dar al Islam formally. In the eyes of the West, Islam, the millennia-long foe, had been put in its place.
But this triumphalist vision of a world ultimately entirely submitted to Allah (through Islam) lived on, taking on a more modern form, more powerful and effective than the Ottoman basket case. Hassan al-Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood (1927), a multi-generational plan to revive true Islam, fight the forces of secular modernity making inroads in the Arab world whose progress al-Banna saw as a regression to the ‘Jahaliyya,’ i.e. the ‘Ignorance’ of the pre-Islamic Arab world. He sought a long-term, multi-generational goal of a new salvific and eventually global Caliphate in which Muslims ruled according to Sharia: Where there was Dar al Harb, there shall be Dar al Islam.
For al-Banna, his triumphalist followers and sympathisers, the demotion of Islam in the eyes of the nations that had occurred through the military and cultural success of Western imperial-colonialists, threatened the very religion itself: ‘a declaration of war on all shapes of Islam.’ For them, Islam must dominate. Few forces today that seek global hegemony are so open about their imperial ambitions.
In the minds of supremacists like al Banna, therefore, the creation of Israel was a further catastrophe in this long war on Islam, the loss of territory in the heart of what was and should bedar al Islam, and a denial of Muslim imperial claims.
The core of the Arab-Muslim irredentist demand that Israel be destroyed, is a direct expression of this imperialist Islam from its first century. Free infidels are anathema to Islam’s triumphalist sovereignty. ‘We cannot concede a grain of sand to Jews.’ For Abul A’la al-Maududi, the most systematic thinker of modern Islam explained, Jews must exist in the state of submission. ‘The purpose for which the Muslims are required to fight is … to put an end to their sovereignty and supremacy.’
To have the dissolution of the Caliphate followed two decades later by a Jewish state in the heart of what should be Dar al Islam was a continuation of the same war ‘against all shapes of Islam.’ For triumphalist Muslims like al-Banna, Islam necessitated dominion. Its demotion on the world stage was an existential threat. Hence, losing the battle with the Jews threatened to be an unmitigated disaster, utter humiliation on a global scale in response to which, in complete confidence in their impending victory, the Arab League promised historic massacres.
To lose would fatally wound triumphalist Islam’s need for visible dominion. To Muslims such as these, Israel was a blasphemy against the Prophet (PBUH). An intolerable degradation. Another nakba. Indeed, The Muslim Brotherhood, initially a weak movement, only came into its own in the fight against Zionism.
Islamic and Arab Imperialism and Irredentism is driving the conflict between the river and the sea
Richard Landes is a historian of millennialism living in Jerusalem; his most recent book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. Introduction: Rethink...
fathomjournal.org
So Israel isnt occupying West Bank and settler violence (terrorism) isnt State sanctioned by jewish supremacists in control of Israel?
Its all Pallywood?
Its all Pallywood?
Did I say that? You’re alluding to that, but that’s not what I’ve said at all. This isn’t about the “Palestinians” in Gaza or the West Bank, but the fact that Non-Muslims are occupying the real estate that lays under Gaza or the West Bank or Israel. That’s the conflict in a nutshell.
If this was about “Palestinians” then the Palestinians would’ve accepted one of the five or so already offered two state solutions that they’ve rejected, & if this was about the “Palestinians” then both Egypt & Jordan in 1948 would have been instrumental to the start of the first nation actually called “Palestine” but that didn’t happen…’cuz…this isn’t about Palestinians.
FIRST READING: The cheering crowds who thronged Canada's cities to celebrate Oct. 7 — National Post
On Parliament Hill, police were recorded barring access only to those who supported a "State of Palestine"
No. Read again. Its the theory of the Landes guy you quoted. 750,000 illegals sttlers and Jewish terrorism is all made for TV according that that guy.
Is it just made for TV? There is no illegal occupation or "settler violence"(terrorism) in occupied Palestine? There arent Jewish Power fascist supremacists with nukes in Tel Aviv?
Iran did it.
If you get the flu, you have aches and pains, chills, body aches, runny nose, cough, general annoyance, etc….
You’re pointing out one symptom, not the ailment, I believe. Yes, there are Israelis in the Westbank settling or whatever, but that’s a symptom and not the disease.
Anyway, back in Canada with Trudeau’s appointee, I wondering what kind of comment she would have on something like this in Canada…
Vancouver anti-Israeli protester burns flag, shouts 'death to Canada' — National Post
Politicians are expressing outrage after a video shows a protester claiming affiliation with Hezbollah and Hamas
Liberals 'considering all options' over pro-terror group Samidoun; Poilievre vows to ban it — National Post
Poilievre's promise follows calls from national Jewish advocacy organizations
Zionism is the disease.If you get the flu, you have aches and pains, chills, body aches, runny nose, cough, general annoyance, etc….
You’re pointing out one symptom, not the ailment, I believe. Yes, there are Israelis in the Westbank settling or whatever, but that’s a symptom and not the disease.
Anyway, back in Canada with Trudeau’s appointee, I wondering what kind of comment she would have on something like this in Canada…
Vancouver anti-Israeli protester burns flag, shouts 'death to Canada' — National Post
Politicians are expressing outrage after a video shows a protester claiming affiliation with Hezbollah and Hamas
Liberals 'considering all options' over pro-terror group Samidoun; Poilievre vows to ban it — National Post
Poilievre's promise follows calls from national Jewish advocacy organizations
So, without Zionism, there would be peace in the Middle East? On Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists unleashed a horrific attack on Israeli civilians, few would have thought that the massacre would go down in Middle Eastern history as a watershed event.
A year later, that date is becoming a permanent marker on calendar as the day the Middle East finally turned the corner. In the beginning, the world treated October 7 as just another outbreak of violence and terror in the Middle East. But as events unfolded, the world is now looking at the bright prospect of achieving the unthinkable goal of peace in the Middle East.
What changed the calculus was the Israel Defence Forces’ determination to unshackle the region from Iran’s tentacles of terror. After neutralizing Hamas, going after Hezbollah — the lethal terrorist outfit that the Iranian regime used to point a gun to Israel’s head — was a game changer.
The depletion and possible elimination of Hezbollah would bring the fight closer to the head of the octopus — Iran.
With any luck, the combination of military pressure from Israel, the loss of its terrorist proxies, renewed sanctions from the international community and civil unrest will cause Iran’s ruling clergy to lose their grip on power, ushering the Iranian people toward a terror-free future.
How things unfold remains to be seen. But this chain of events leaves a very big question for Muslim rulers and their populations: has the pursuit of political gains through the promotion of jihad worked?
Yes, it worked for the Islamist clergy in Iran and kept them in power for 45 years, but what about people of Iran? What about Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese and Yemenis? Their states are in ruins because they followed the jihadist ideology. The pursuit of unrealistic geopolitical goals through international terrorism was always bound to fail. And it has now failed spectacularly.
The jihadist ideology — which views non-Muslims as enemies and seeks to subjugate them through force — is archaic, medieval and obsolete. It might have had its appeal during the Crusades, but the world started changing in 17th century, when Westphalian concept of the state emerged. And by the turn of 19th century, the institution of nation-states had taken root in the human imagination.
Opinion: If Israel is successful, it will unlock a brighter future for Muslims — National Post
A Middle East free of the Iranian mullahs and their terror proxies would usher in a new age of prosperity for Muslims throughout the region
We’ve both had personal experience with jihadis and are aware of how the jihad industry works. We’ve received fatwas and death threats for critiquing radical Islam. We’re interacted with jihadis while covering the war on terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We can confidently say that the status quo only serves the ruling elites — in case of Iran, the IRGC and clergy council; and in case of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the military and intelligence brass, along with top commanders.
Everyone else works on meagre salaries. They are motivated by pro-jihad, anti-infidel propaganda — the only “education” many of them get in their entire lifetimes. Most of them can’t even imagine what progress and development could bring to them. Most of the foot soldiers don’t even understand the reasons why they are fighting, yet they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause.
If the ongoing IDF campaign succeeds and Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen break free from the clutches of Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, the millions of Muslims living in these areas could get a fair shot at a brighter future for their children. They hope to pick up the pieces and start new institutions that are modern and progressive.
A new generation has emerged in Muslim countries in the Middle East, and even in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They have seen the perils of state-sponsored jihad projects throughout the entire region. This is an opportunity for them to change course and turn the corner.
They must realize that what Israel did to protect its borders and its population after the October 7 massacre provides a rare opportunity for the region’s Muslims to chart a course toward development and progress.
