FREEDOM FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE

This is our moment and we embrace see it.

The same week three of the Coutts, Alberta protestors are found guilty of mischief, a young man outside the Trump trial in New York pours an accelerant over his own head and body, flicks open a lighter and becomes a ball of flame. A few blocks away, on the campus of Columbia University, 100 students protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza and demanding divestment from Israel focussed-endowment funds — are rounded up by police and taken to jail. Nearly a week later, as I write this piece, protests are exploding at campuses across America. Pushback against them from politicians, Israel-supporting billionaires, including Elon Musk and hedge funder Bill Ackman along with Davosian Western governments, is ever more aggressive.

It turns out the burning man was struggling with issues that arose during Covid and then the death of his mother. Max Azzarello was convinced the Washington political uniparty was up to no good and planned this terrible event as a warning. Like all protesters, he wanted to be heard. He felt as a citizen, no on was listening. For reasons I can’t explain, after dousing the flames, first responders left Azzarello alone, without comfort as he lay dying on the pavement. A sad metaphor for our times. Photo below is disturbing.

Make no mistake: major historical events are churning. Tectonic plates are shifting under our feet. And we are not ready.

Video below of police arresting students on the USC campus.

I watch the escalating violence against the young, university protestors with growing anxiety — remembering Four Dead in Ohio, to steal a phrase from Neil Young, describing the killing of students by the National Guard at a Kent State Vietnam War protest. It’s all feeling very 1970’s again — but more scary. Yet it is not the protesters or police I fear. It’s us.

Stick with me as I work my way through my unease, fueled in part by the position of some fellow travellers with whom I share a many beliefs.

Never in my long life have I witnessed a movement with more grace, beauty and integrity than our truckers. They showed us the power and necessity of protest — how it saves lives and even souls. I hold tight to the courage of Tamara Lich, Chris Barber and the Coutts men. No one could believe that a persnickety, abashed country like ours would lead the way out of darkness and back into light.

Today I am grappling with how people who supported that protest — who saw propaganda being weaponized with media collusion — have latched on to the Tsunami of negative stories being thrown at the pro-Palestinian students. They are terrorists. They are antisemitic. They are violent. They are pro-Hamas. And more, including overheated stories of attacks on Jewish students that on close inspection don’t hold up. Sound familiar? Many of the students involved in the encampments are themselves Jewish and taking a principled stand that they will pay a heavy price for. There are even regular religious observances taking place.

I am not naive and do not excuse the excesses by some students that media, pols and billionaires hyper-focus on. Serious and gravely insensitive blunders and provocations have occured. A student recently was punished for making threatening remarks about Zionists. The early chants celebrating October 7th as a resistance victory were awful and I have said so many times.

Post-modernist tropes of oppressed/oppressor are annoying and impede persuasion. Most people shut down when they hear that intractable language. I know I do. But in this case they are correct to call out the ongoing ruination of the Palestinians — especially given that it is funded and supported by the power structures in the West. Those who fought a similar struggle alongside the African National Congress and its leader Nelson Mandela are considered heroes today.

I used to work for Bobby Muller, a Vietnam Veteran who returned paralysed and in a wheelchair to protest that war and to found peace organizations. He threw his purple heart into the crowd at a massive protest in DC. These brave returning vets were dismissed as commies, pinkos and even cowards but now they too are recognized by history as heroes. The Vietnam Memorial in DC is black granite for a reason.

I had the honour of working in comms for this Bobby during the Iraq War and he wrote the prologue to my book.

You might not like the student’s goals. You might even still support Israel’s increasingly discredited military project. But if we fall for round two of divide and conquer — round three will be back for all of us very soon.

My dear friend, Dr. Francis Christian paid a high price for speaking out to protect children from dangerous vaccines and I know him to be a deeply Christian man who lives a peaceful life full of spirituality and kindness. I was thrilled to learn this weekend that he has published a piece, supporting the duty of students to protest the war on Gaza. We had an encouraging chat and he never lets me down.

For those of us who have resolved to fight the good fight of freedom, for those of us who believe in the right to protest and the right to free speech, we must support free speech anywhere, everywhere, even in our universities. Especially in our universities.

We don’t have to agree with those who protest. We may even detest their views with all our hearts. But we of all people must uphold their right to protest. To protest in peace is a fundamental right. It follows from the right to free speech and it is deeply indebted to our Christian civilization and the bequeathing to us of the ability to choose life or death, blessing or curse, for ourselves.

What the media aren’t telling you is that the protests are having an effect and that in Israel the tide is starting to turn. Israelis are waking up from trauma-driven mass hysteria to the realization that Netanyahu’s war has ensured Israel might never be safe again. People will ask — if Israel can’t provide safety for Jewish people what is the point of its existence?

One of Israel’s most revered but controversial historians has written a devastating piece that reads like the howling of a dying beast. Yuval Harari, made headlines in March of 2020 when he castigated Netanyahu for tyrannical C-19 policies.

Philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari harshly criticized Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, saying the prime minister was using the coronavirus crisis to destroy Israeli democracy – a tweet that sparked the ire of the premier’s son, Yair, who was quick to fire back.

“Coronavirus has killed democracy,” Harari wrote. “Netanyahu lost the elections. So under pretext of fighting corona, he has closed the Israeli parliament, ordered people to stay in their homes, and is issuing whatever emergency decrees he wishes. This is called a dictatorship.”

Hariri is now calling Netanyahu’s October 7th response revenge and suicide. Here’s the shocking Haaretz headline and a few paragraphs — ignored by western media and the neocon influencers who have become Netanyahu’s enablers. Do take time to read every word here.

In the coming days Israel will have to make historic policy decisions, ones that will shape its fate and the fate of the entire region for generations to come. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have repeatedly proven that they are unfit to make such decisions. The policies they pursued for many years have brought Israel to the brink of destruction. So far, they have shown no regret for their past mistakes, and no inclination to change direction. If they continue to shape policy, they will lead us and the whole Middle East to perdition. Instead of rushing into a new war with Iran, we should first learn the lessons of Israel's failures over the past six months of war.

War is a military means for achieving political aims, and there is one key yardstick by which to measure success in war: Were the political aims achieved? Following the horrendous massacre of October 7, Israel needed to liberate the hostages and disarm Hamas, but these should not have been its only aims. In light of the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran and its agents of chaos, Israel also needed to deepen its alliance with Western democracies, strengthen cooperation with moderate Arab forces, and work to establish a stable regional order. However, the Netanyahu government ignored all these aims, and instead focused on revenge. It has failed to secure the release of all the hostages, and has not disarmed Hamas. Worse, it intentionally inflicted a humanitarian disaster on the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and thereby undermined the moral and geopolitical basis for Israel's existence.

Like the Japanese in 1945, many Israelis in 2024 are trapped in an echo chamber that promises them victory, even as we are on the verge of defeat. How to break this echo chamber? It would be unwise to wait for the atomic bomb, or for God to speak on the radio.

The Netanyahu government, which has failed in so much, must finally take responsibility. It is the Netanyahu government that adopted the disastrous agenda that brought us here, and it is the government that adopted the Samson-like policy of revenge and suicide. Woe to us if the same Samsons are now permitted to make the most important strategic and political decisions in Israel's history.

This government has reached the point at which it must endure the unendurable, admit failure, and immediately resign so that someone else can open a new page. It is vital to establish a new government, one that will be guided by a different moral compass, will end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and will begin to rebuild our international standing. If we don't change our policy toward the Palestinians, we will be left to face Iran alone, and our end will be like that of Samson, who in impotent rage brought down the house on the heads of everyone.

Western media are ignoring this bombshell and the growing demonstrations in Israel that support these ideas. The Bibi cheerleading squad, hopefully also in its last throes, continues to demand the quelling of critical voices. All of this instead of focussing on the obliteration of innocent civilians, mostly women and children.

There has even been an embarrassingly bad data analysis of the death numbers making the rounds. No serious person is actually quibbling with the Hamas Ministry tally and Euromed a highly regarded humanitarian agency backs up those reports.

The Israeli army has killed 42,510 Palestinians over the course of its 200-day attack, 38,621 of whom were civilians, including 10,091 women and 15,780 children. The bodies of several thousand are still stuck under the rubble, while thousands remain missing and are presumed dead. These statistics include the killing of 137 journalists, 356 medical personnel, and 42 civil defense personnel.

This flawed analysis ws cited by most media and was enough to raise doubts and turn down the heat for a day or so following the World Central Kitchen massacre. Its weaknesses were of course reminiscent of the badly-designed vaccine supporting studies that would appear out of nowhere.

Smearing students and amplifying any exculpatory tidbit that lets Netanyahu off the hook is the playbook. Reporting critically on the catastrophe unfolding for Gazan civilians is forbidden.

Fox News, Piers Morgan, Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray, Newsweek and the formerly estimable Tablet Magazine seem woefully lost. One young woman whose tale was highlighted in The Free Press and elsewhere claimed to have been “stabbed in the eye” with a Palestinian flag but offered no evidence to support what would be a criminal offense. The video shows something else and Matt Orfalea, an investigative video journalist debunked her with a thread on X.

Newsweek is the home of editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, a bright and talented writer who has had some success as a critic of woke-ism but for reasons I don’t understand is throwing her journalism career under the bus.

Ungar-Sargon took a significant drubbing in a debate on Israel/Gaza and was bested by Dave Smith, a comedian. On Fox News, she repeated Israeli hasbara (propaganda) including that anyone who is against Israel, meaning Israel’s war on Gazans, is also against America. Where have we heard that before?

Ungar-Sargon does not recognize that many of the protestors are Jewish. That Rabbis are present. Also not mentioned is the NYPD’s exoneration of the students.

NYPD John Chell , saying later Thursday that "the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.

And when one of the Fox hosts tells a whopper, repeating @3:25 the babies baked in oven phoney atrocity story, no correction is made. And he goes further, suggesting falsely that the students are also holocaust deniers for which there is no evidence. His boss, Lachlan Murdoch, like Elon Musk made a trip to Israel.

The generation we call snowflakes is turning out to be sturdier than we thought. They are not deterred despite hundreds of arrests, suspension of their education, names affixed now to lists that will prevent many firms from hiring them. In the end, the career-ending smear of antisemitism through doxxing will be a high price to pay and we know that Ackman is keeping his lists.

Also top of mind are the awful days that followed Prime Minister Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act and the images of police pushing through a line of men chanting love over fear. It was from police body-cam footage played in an Ottawa courtroom during the trial of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. My eyes stung and my heart burst with pride over their restraint. This photo nearly captures it.

In our own comfortable tribes we will disagree with each other. But as critical thinkers who believe democracies are stronger when underpinned by the best of our human selves - we should make an effort to understand the shared desperation to just be heard. In the end it is the ultimate free speech litmus test.

In Canada, there have been some ugly incidents at protests off campus that required individual arrests but they have been used to condemn all, some of whom may have family under siege in Gaza. Many appear to be Muslim and perhaps immigrants which also inflames a certain segment of our great cultural mosaic. I have my own issues with massive immigration from countries that don’t share some of our values but that doesn’t mean they should be prevented from protesting once we let them in. How would that even work? Welcome to Canada, the great democracy, but do please keep your mouth shut — even if your relatives have all been killed under Israeli bombardments enabled in part by our government.

Conversely, the students probably would think the truckers are white nationalists who hate black people. They might believe the phoney smears about convoy protesters spread by media and government, the very same bodies now smearing them. Will they ever see this connection? No — because siloed media keeps them from understanding what we all might have in common. Fortitude, insight and grace. Will we ever see a day when all tribes lift their voices together in a united front against the elites who want nothing more than to crush our spirits and keep us apart? Until then, I’ll daydream of a moment when a few big, beautiful rigs appear on campus and are welcomed by students who need protection from what’s about to come.

Stay critical.

#truthovertribe

Note and update: So many of you have ruled out the importance of Yuval Hariri’s influence because of his association with the WEF — something I initially included but edited out for space. My point, obviously badly expressed, is that voices important in Israel are now saying what would not have been published even six weeks ago. I’m am not endorsing his positions on transhumanism or his association with the WEF - which tacitly endorses Israel’s response. Here is another piece by a different columnist published on April 11.

We've lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel's individual and mass psychology. There's a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It's no fun to admit that we've lost, so we lie to ourselves.

Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There's no way around it. The good guys don't always win.

The above piece is worth a full read, especially when The Times of Israel, amongst others is reporting on possible ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and certain cabinet ministers.

Israel is making a concerted effort to head off feared plans by the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials, an Israeli government source told The Times of Israel on Sunday. The National Security Council is leading the campaign, according to the source.

Yes, the tide is turning. And there is discussion this morning that Bibi is offering a ceasefire of some sort.

Hope this helps.