Online gambling and betting in Canada is booming, with each province allowed to regulate its own space. Ontario, Canada’s most populated province, turned two this year after leading the way in April 2022. In what should motivate Alberta and other provinces, Ontario is already reaping the rewards, generating $100 million annually in gambling revenue. Will the local administration in Alberta do what is needed?

Talks have been rife that Alberta is considering going the Ontario way by having an open-licensing system. In July 2023, the minister for Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally, issued a mandate to make this province a hub of online sports betting and gambling.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently asked Nally to cooperate with indigenous partners and other stakeholders to develop an online gaming strategy. The main focus will be on revenue generation and responsible gambling. In light of this, Nally said Alberta’s primary focus is becoming a “leading hub for iGaming” with streamlined regulations and low corporate taxes. Such conditions should position Alberta to become a leading iGaming destination.

A few weeks ago, the minister attended the ICE international gaming conference held in London. Together with Ontario’s Attorney General, Doug Downey, and other stakeholders, Nally participated in a roundtable discussion regarding the status of iGaming in Canada. CDC Gaming Reports also revealed that the discussion highlighted the success of iGaming in Ontario and how Alberta can emulate this success story.

Looking into the Alberta Budget 2024, it’s evident that state monopoly could soon give way to Canadian casinos to thrive in the province. Alberta took the first baby steps towards a more liberal gambling sector after setting aside $1 million for gambling. This budget will support the looming review of the Gaming, Liquor, and Cannabis Act and supporting Regulation. The idea is to review the entire regulatory framework to find more funding ways for Alberta charities and community projects.

Major operators like BetMGM, PointsBet, and PokerStars have since hired lobbyists to ensure commercial operators become a reality in Alberta. Speaking to investors and industry analysts in March this year, PointsBet CEO Sam Swanell tipped Alberta and British Columbia to legalize online betting soon. He noted that this could provide the much-needed expansion of that TAM.

Alberta is yet to take full advantage of online gambling despite being the country’s fourth-largest province, with around 4.3 million people. Smaller markets in North America, such as West Virginia and Connecticut, are already benefiting from commercialized online gambling. The good news is that noises about legal online gambling are getting louder in Alberta. It’s just a matter of when the government will make the announcement.

What Next for Online Gambling and Betting in Alberta?

Including a $1 million gambling review budget is definitely a step in the right direction. However, there’s still much to do to end Alberta’s long-standing gambling status quo. But at least the budget opens the door for further discussions and reforms regarding iGaming in Alberta. That discussion has been underway, although the momentum has increased in the last year or so.

As it stands, PlayAlberta.ca is the only regulated online gaming platform in Alberta. It’s a government-run website operated by the AGLC (Alberta Gaming Liquor and Cannabis). Besides casino games, this website provides sports betting and lottery-style gaming experiences. The legal sign-up age on PlayAlberta.ca is 18 years.

For Albertans who prefer more gambling freedom, the government doesn’t restrict anyone from joining offshore operators. Most gaming sites operating in Alberta are licensed in Curacao, the UK, and Malta. Compared to PlayAlberta.ca, these websites provide a more extensive variety of games, rewards, and general experience.

In conclusion, it’s just a matter of when Alberta will introduce an open-licensing market. This approach has proved to be a success elsewhere, especially in Ontario. A recent Ipsos report in Ontario revealed that only 13.6% of the residents prefer to gamble on offshore websites. Alberta could soon follow this path, although there’s much work to do to realize this dream.

By MYRON LOVE I remember many years ago attending a presentation by Simon Wiesenthal, the world’s leading Nazi hunter, during which he made the point that the focus of Holocaust education should not be on the number six million – the number of estimated Jews who were murdered – but rather on the 12 million martyrs – including other targeted groups such as the Roma, people who were gay, the mentally and physically handicapped and the many great many Slavic people who were also murdered. After the Jews, the Slavs were next on the list.
By focusing strictly on Germans killing Jews, he observed, it became too easy to make it out to be only Germans versus Jews – thereby making it easier for Holocaust deniers and absolving the other European peoples who were complicit in the killings.
Similarly, while we naturally mourn our Jewish brethren who were so horribly slaughtered on October 7, we need to also bear in mind that Hamas made no distinction in its murderous rampage between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs or between Israelis and foreign workers.
In a posting for The Gatestone Institute on November 30, Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh noted that he Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7 did not slaughter Jews alone. The terrorists also murdered and kidnapped scores of Muslim citizens of Israel, including members of the Bedouin community. The terrorists’ murder spree made zero distinction between young and old, Muslim and Jew.
“Scores of Arab Israelis were wounded, murdered or taken prisoner,” he reported.
One such brave individual was 23-year-old Awad Darawshe, an Arab-Israeli paramedic who was on duty at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, which was among the first locations under attack. When the medical staff on site were ordered to flee, he insisted on remaining behind to treat the wounded.
Abu Toameh suggests that the paramedic thought that because he was Arab, he could reason with the killers. He was murdered nonetheless.
Another courageous Arab-Israeli that the writer noted, 50-year-old Abed al-Rahman Alnasasrah, was murdered by Hamas terrorists when he attempted to rescue people from the music festival. He was married and a father of six children.
Fatima Altallaqat, 35, from the Bedouin village near Ofakim, was murdered while working with her husband near the city of Ofakim in southern Israel. She was a mother of nine children, the eldest nine years old.
Abu Toameh quotes her husband as saying: “We’re a religious Muslim family and she wore the traditional headdress of a devout woman. It is inconceivable they [Hamas terrorists] could not see who was inside [the car]. They were five meters away from her as they passed.”
Forty bullets were fired into her.
Abu Toameh further cites the comments of Suleiman Zayadneh, brother and uncle, respectively, to four of the Arab-Israeli hostages, who describes himself “as proud to be a Palestinian and Muslim”.
‘The people who came to shoot and kill — they know nothing of religion,” the writer quoted Zayadneh as saying. “These [Hamas] people came and killed left and right.”
Abu Toameh went on to reference the words of Nuseir Yassin, a video blogger with 65 million followers. Two days after the massacre, he wrote: “I realized that… to a terrorist invading Israel, all citizens are targets. More than 40 of them [the murdered] are Arabs. Killed by other Arabs. And I do not want to live under a Palestinian government. Which means I only have one home, even if I’m not Jewish: Israel…. So from today forward, I view myself as… Israeli first. Palestinian second. Sometimes it takes a shock like this to see so clearly.”
Abu Toameh reported that “there have been many storie about reciprocal inter-communal generosity and heroism in the aftermath of this national tragedy, and they create hope for the future”.
He quoted a statement by the Darwashe Family:
“We are very proud of Awad’s actions… This is what we would expect from him and what we expect from everyone in our family — to be human, to stay human and to die human.”
Abu Toameh also quoted Ali Alziadna, four of whose family members were kidnapped, as saying that he was “touched by the outpouring of support” by other Israelis.
“People from all over the country have come to hug and support our family,” Alziadna said. “The entire nation is one family now.”

Abu Toameh pointed out that many Arab citizens of Israel serve as IDF officers and policemen, risking their lives for their fellow Israelis. Many are serving at the front lines, saving lives.
Undoubtedly, Abu Toameh suggested, one of the objectives of the Hamas massacre, in addition to slaughtering as many Israelis as possible, was to thwart normalization between Israel and Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Hamas may also have aimed to damage relations between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.
”The terror group was, without doubt, hoping that we would witness another cycle of violence between Jews and Arabs inside Israel, similar to that which erupted in May 2021,’ Abu Toameh posited. “Then, Hamas succeeded in inciting a large number of Arab citizens of Israel to take to the streets and attack their Jewish neighbors and Israeli police officers.
“This time, however, the Arab-Israelis have not heeded the calls by Hamas. One reason is that Arab-Israelis saw, with their own eyes, how Hamas terrorists make no distinction between Jews and Muslims.
“Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated that it cares nothing for the well-being of Arabs and Muslims. From their luxury homes and hotel rooms in the safety of Qatar and Turkey, Hamas leaders give the orders to attack Israel and then sit back and let the world weep over the destruction they wrought upon their own people.
“On October 7,” Abu Toameh concluded, “Hamas metaphorically shot itself in the foot by showing the world, with unfathomably ghoulish pride, by way of Go-Pro cameras and other self-documentation, that it has neither a religious nor a secular-humanist set of values. Perhaps the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip should look at the Arab citizens of Israel and note how they enjoy equal rights, democracy, freedom of speech and a free media. If Palestinians wish to live well, like the Arab-Israelis, this is the time for them to get rid of Hamas and all the terror leaders who, for seven decades, have brought them nothing but one disaster after another.”
It is too bad that so many gullible fools in our Western societies refuse to open their eyes to the truth.

By MICHAEL POSNER
Copyright @ great untold stories inc.
Reprinted with permission

Nov 27, 2023
I’m not worried about Israel.
Israel can — Israel will — look after itself. It may take a few months, but the IDF will eliminate Hamas as a military entity of any consequence, demolish its billion-dollar network of tunnels (paid for in part by the gullible European community), and destroy what the Gaza Strip has effectively been for 15 years, the world’s largest urban terrorist camp, and a forward base of Iranian subversion.
Much of the heavy lifting — all of northern Gaza, parts of Gaza City — has already been done. Hamas’ parliament, such as it pretended to be, lies in ruins. Thousands of its foot soldiers have been dispatched, ostensibly to frolic with the 72 virgins. Others will follow. Ismail Haniyeh and the rest of the charming Hamas cabal — billionaires barricaded in five-star Qatari hotels — would be best advised to buy UVeyes, the hi-tech device that scans vehicles for bombs. An Israeli invention, by the way. Southern Gaza, particularly Khan Younis, remains, a formidable tactical challenge, but not insurmountable.
In deference to the jackals on the Arab street, moderate Arab leaders have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war, invoking the familiar canards — proportionality, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and collective punishment, yada, yada. Privately, however, they are cheering Israel on, grateful that it is doing what they would gladly do themselves, given half a chance. A few have even bold enough to say it out loud.
It’s instructive that, while Israel’s critics convulse in paroxysms of grief, not a single Arab or Muslim nation has offered to harbour a single Palestinian — not for an hour. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, dragged its heels even on delivery of aid, and on the release of Gazans holding dual citizenship. Can we speak the truth? The wider Arab world reviles Palestinians far more than any Israeli. And justifiably, given the havoc Palestinians have wrought in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.
Exemplars of equivocation, paragons of posturing, earnest European politicians descended on the region, predictably condemning violence on both sides. They shook hands, nodded heads and then they expressed their deeply considered position. It boiled down to this: ‘you, Israel, clearly have the right to defend yourself. Just make sure you don’t kill anyone, okay?’
Speaking of double standards, the International Red Cross ought to win this year’s Golden Tourniquet award. The IRC navigates freely in dozens of challenging war zones, but in Gaza, it somehow could not manage to deliver a single bandage to any of the estimated 240 hostages, until the exchanges began. In fact, it took six weeks for the IRC president just to schedule a meeting with hostage family members in Geneva. Of course, it did manage a humanitarian visit to Hamas prisoners in Israel.
The IRC is part of Gaza’s vast, bureaucratic labyrinth. No fewer than 23 United Nations agencies maintain a presence there, manoeuvring within the nightmare of Hamas’ iron-fisted governance. But what applies to every journalist operating within the Strip, and to every doctor or nurse in hospitals that double as Hamas hideouts and weapon arsenals, also applies to UN staff. They are compromised. They can or will say nothing critical of the regime, for fear of their lives. Scan a decade of UN Commission of Human Rights reports, and you are unlikely to even find the word Hamas. In the Kafkaesque universe of UN rapporteurs, only Israel is guilty of human rights abuses. Some agency employees are actually complicit in promoting terror, using school curricula that lionize martyrs and teach Palestinian children to demonize Jews.
Another UN agency, UNICEF, which ostensibly exists to protect children, went to visit Gaza, but then managed to cancel plans to meet with parents and grandparents of the estimated 40 children taken as hostages by Hamas.
And the Western media? It is to laugh, or cry. Reporters for the BBC, CBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, the Guardian — all the usual suspects — might double as contortionists with Cirque du Soleil, so expertly did they twist every Hamas claim and statistic into unvarnished truth, and every Israeli talking point into “an allegation we have not been able to independently verify.” These organizations served an unending diet of stories that invariably cast Israel as the villain of the piece. No wonder, then, the animus directed at it by a heavily propagandized, ill-informed public.
Everyone with half a brain knows that Israel’s destruction of these Iranian proxies is a victory for light over darkness, and good over unadulterated evil. Alas, the number of people with less than half a brain seems to be rising exponentially.
In the early 1920s, the visionary Ze’ev Jabotinsky maintained that Arabs in what was then British-mandate Palestine would never voluntarily acquiesce to the Zionist enterprise. They would only acquiesce involuntarily, and only when they finally understood and resigned themselves to that fact that no campaign of Arab terrorism, no coalition of armed forces, no amount of outside pressure — nothing — would ever breach Israel’s iron wall. For iron wall, read: military might. Or, invincibility. Only then, Jabotinsky argued, would Arab extremists be forced to yield to Arab moderates, willing to sue for an enduring peace.
Transparently, we are not there yet; we may never be there. As former Knesset member Einat Wulf noted recently, the essence of the conflict is simply this: Israel is dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish state. The Palestinians are pledged to its annihilation. Everything else is a detail.
But the IDF’s campaign in Gaza, and the threat of its extension to Hezbollah, to Lebanon and implicitly to Iran, is a projection of Jabotinsky’s iron wall. For 15 frustrating years, Israel fought Hamas with one hand behind its back, restrained by Western diplomatic pressure, and by a reluctance to sacrifice the lives of Israel soldiers in a bloody ground campaign. The time for half measures is over. On October 7th, the Hamas death cult issued an invitation to total war; Israel promptly RSVPed. Don’t mess with the Zohan.
True, years will be required for Israelis to recover from the collective trauma of the pogrom, and before its shattered faith in its security apparatus is restored. Politically, a national reckoning is required. A leadership transition doubtless will occur — in the prime minister’s office, the IDF, the Shin Bet. All bear some degree of culpability for the events of October 7th. There also remains a smorgasbord of contentious domestic issues, including judicial reform, that are still unresolved. None of this will be easy. But in time, the Israeli nation will be whole again.
The real crisis is elsewhere. The real crisis is here. No one who has watched what is happening on Western streets, no one who has objectively absorbed the response to the atrocities committed on October 7th, can be sanguine about our future. It is Western civilization that looks increasingly vulnerable.
Let’s start with Europe. The Europe that incubated the Renaissance and spawned the Enlightenment, is effectively finished. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But inevitably. The Arabic handwriting is already on the wall.
Three decades or more of largely unrestricted immigration from Muslim and other third world countries is rapidly redrawing the demographic maps of the UK, Germany, France, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Denmark. What record immigration levels started — the de facto Islamification of Europe — the higher birth rate will finish. Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? It hardly matters. The collapse of Europe, as we knew it, is inevitable.
It’s inevitable because, as everyone knows (but seldom concedes), new migrant groups overwhelmingly do not truly assimilate, do not embrace the traditional values and practices of their host countries. Immigrants may shop at the same supermarkets, and wear the same Nikes, but they cling to mores, customs and ways of thinking fundamentally antithetical to secular liberalism. The mystery is why anyone ever thought it would be otherwise.
“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the newcomer to integrate,” former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently lamented. “It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.” A month or so after making her comments, Braverman was fired from the Conservative cabinet, another victim of cancel culture. It is one thing to know the truth; God forbid you should speak it.
Braverman’s remarks echoed those of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2010, who shocked the world by acknowledging that “this [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed.” Nevertheless, in a humanitarian gesture, Germany admitted 2.1 million new migrants in 2015, almost 300,000 Muslims from Syria alone.
Far from embracing their host culture, many immigrants revile it. At least five thousand Europeans travelled to the Middle East to join Isis. Remember Isis — the Islamic State? Those fine Salafalists who made snuff films of beheadings of journalists and aid workers?
Some young European Islamists are easily radicalized: they have genuine grievances. Poor jobs (if any), inferior housing, and the dim likelihood of ever clawing their way into the shrinking middle class. Add the incitement from the mosques, the anti-integrationist, anti-western dogma delivered by imams — et voila: the next suicide bomber is born.
Extremism aside, does anyone seriously believe that the hard-won fruits of the liberal tradition — gender equality, lgbtq+ rights, freedom of speech — apply within the teeming Muslim communities of Malmo, Birmingham, Bradford, Brussels, Avignon, Marseilles, etc.? Those rights and others — habeas corpus, due process, freedom of the press — are rare in the Muslim world. Indeed, according to Islam, all commitments to the inviolability of human rights are expressly preempted by Sharia law, soft-pedalled though it is.
So: on the assumption that the West’s secular liberal values are worth preserving and defending, will they survive when a critical demographic mass no longer exists?
A decade after Merkel’s truth bomb, the romantic vision of multicultural cross-pollination peddled by other western governments has been exposed as a myth. It is simply not possible to reconcile the comforting, kumbaya fairy tale that we are all brothers and sisters — ‘you savour my shawarma and I’ll devour your poutine’ — and then take to the streets to rip posters of kidnapped children from light standards, shoot bullets at synagogues and Jewish schools, and glorify death-cult jihadists intent on unholy war. The chasm cannot be bridged.
The virtue-signalling on pluralism has gone hand in hand with incessant bromides about diversity. As others have noted (Frank Furedi, Mark Steyn), the diversity agenda emerged first in Europe, as a hoped-for antidote to the evils of nationalism, which had yielded two world wars, left millions dead, and the continent in rubble. The ostensible lesson: patriotism bad, diversity good.
Be careful what you wish for. Diversity, it turns out, is the incubator of identity politics, everyone now required to wear a tribal badge for race, ethnicity, gender and pronoun preferences. And what a winner identity politics has been, eh?
While performative politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continue to sing ad nauseum from the multicultural/diversity hymn book, the grim reality has been on display for weeks: hundreds of thousands, in every major European city and many in North America, openly calling for the death of Jews, thirsting for a ‘multicultural’ pogrom, and valourizing murderers, rapists, and kidnappers.
Despite elaborate attempts to fudge its meaning, their kindergarten chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is a clarion call for a genocide of the Jews. (That phrase, not incidentally, was first invoked in the mid-1930s, when Arab leaders told Britain’s Peel Commission that they would countenance no Jewish state anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea). Not a few of these aspiring Einsatzgruppen — no small irony — are Jewish, or claim to be. Indeed, the hate marches, as Suella Braverman accurately characterized them, have been populated by a United Nations of antisemites — not unlike the United Nations itself.
Notably, there were no such demonstrations when 158,000 Muslims died in the Yemenite civil war, nor any public protests when the Kuwaitis evicted almost 300,000 Palestinians (ethnic cleansing, anyone?), no demands for ceasefire when Syrian strongman Bashir Al-Assad killed 3,900 Palestinians, bombed their schools and hospitals, deployed nerve gas, and catalyzed the exodus of 5.7 million Syrians.
In this light, it’s difficult — actually, it’s impossible — not to conclude that what really motivates the protesters has very little to do with the suffering of their Arabs brothers, and almost everything to do with unfiltered, unfettered Jew-hatred.
Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the world’s oldest virus, long-suppressed, has been loosed from the laboratory and is spreading, fast. Millions are now afflicted, demonstrably in the grip of some kind of mass hysteria. Baying mobs, acts of vandalism, the unapologetic embrace of toxic ideology — can anyone doubt their yearning to do to Jewish communities around the world precisely what Hamas did to the hapless residents of Israel?
About militant Islam, the West remains largely in denial. Far too many people still naively believe the conflict is territorial, that if only Israel made sufficient concessions, a two-state solution could be found, and peace would be made. But land, West Bank settlements, the so-called occupation — none of this is remotely the issue. The shaheeds of the fledgling Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964 were attacking Jews and Jewish settlers long before the 1967 war, before Israel acquired a single hectare of the West Bank.
Before the Six-Day War, Jordan controlled all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; Egypt controlled the Sinai. Did anyone then say Palestinians deserved a state of their own? Did anyone campaign for Palestinian self-determination? No— not a word.
The point is, movements birthed by the Muslim Brotherhood, including Sunni radicals like Hamas, regard any Israeli presence in the holy land as a cancer to be excised. All of Israel— Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem— is therefore deemed an illegal occupation. And the Islamists are obsessively committed to slaughtering the infidel occupiers. One prominent spiritual leader, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, regarded Adolf Hitler as a divine punishment for the Jews, and advocated for another Holocaust, “inflicted by the hand of the Faithful” —i.e., Muslims.
To that end, any means is justified. What the western mind seems unable to grasp is that, as philosopher Sam Harris has explained, jihadists feel no compunction using civilians as human shields, because they know “any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity…If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, or resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.”
Perhaps October 7th will help move the needle of our understanding; I’m not optimistic.
It will be argued, inevitably, that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful. That is undeniable. But is it relevant? Where are these peaceful Muslims in the current controversy? Have there been any counter-demonstrations — of any size — by moderate Muslims, to protest the haters of London, Paris, New York, Toronto, etc.? How many moderate Muslim politicians, imams, intellectuals or TikTok/Instagram influencers have penned op-ed pieces, given sermons, appeared on television, or recorded videos to say, in effect, ‘I categorically and unreservedly disown the Hamas massacre, and these marchers; they are giving Islam a bad name’?
There’s an obvious reason why this almost never happens. The moderates are intimidated, effectively cowed. They may privately rail against Islamic fundamentalism, but it is simply too dangerous to speak out.
Moreover, if even .01 percent of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims is a murderous zealot, that’s 1.8 million — the equivalent of a city the size of Mosul.
Another common argument is that, however precise Israel’s weapons, however scrupulous the IDF’s efforts to minimize casualties, many innocent Gazans are dying — and thus radicalizing the next generation. This thesis, too, is yawn-worthy, because all the evidence suggests that if (in the unlikely event) democratic elections were ever held in Gaza or the West Bank, Hamas or some facsimile would win the vote handily. A recent poll conducted by Arab World for Research and Development reported that 75 percent of Palestinians support the massacre of October 7th, and 83 per cent endorse the slaughtering of Jews. In other words, most of them already have murder on their minds— what difference a few more?
For Jews, one of the most worrying aspects of the weekly hate orgies has been the apparent unwillingness of the police — except in Germany— to intervene aggressively. Yes, the authorities are hopelessly outnumbered. But the larger concern is that police forces themselves have become increasingly politicized, indoctrinated in the same progressive ideology as many of the protesters — champions of diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI is the ugly stepchild of critical race theory, which assumes a priori that the West is irredeemably evil, racist, and colonialist, and that its demise should be welcomed, not mourned.
Thus, the manifestations of moral inversion: Instead of preventing people from stripping off the kidnap posters, some police officials have actually joined in. Instead of arresting demonstrators calling for a new intifada — remember the intifada? When Palestinian suicide bombers blew up Israeli buses and children buying pizza? — most police forces have stood idly by. Yet while letting hate speech go uncurbed, British cops actually arrested a man who had the temerity to post a video objecting to the dozens of Palestinian flags in his neighbourhood.
“Two things form the bedrock of any open society,” writer Salmon Rushdie has said. “Freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.” Ultimately, rigorous, impartial enforcement of the rule of law is all that stands between social order and anarchy, between where we are today and the next Kristallnacht — or worse.
One would like to think the outlook in American, Australia or Canada is rosier than Europe. It isn’t.
On Veterans Day in the United States, pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City climbed lamp posts to tear down the American flag, and replace it with the Palestinian flag.
In Sydney, even before the Israelis had finished counting their corpses, emissaries of the religion of peace were in the streets, calling for the gassing of Jews.
In Canada, a country with “no core identity” according to its jejune prime minister, Remembrance Day was marked by speeches that ignored the heroic sacrifices of previous wartime generations, to rail against — you guessed it — white supremacy, colonialism and racism. In other words, the West, by virtue of is original sins, deserves the kinds of barbarism associated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis and Iran.
Two weeks ago, Sarah Jama, an independent member of the Ontario legislature — evicted earlier from the New Democratic Party for spewing anti-Jewish hate — co-signed a letter to Canadian parliamentarians, urging them to end support for Israel. In a measure of their moral derangement, the signatories — describing themselves as “residents of so-called Canada”— alleged that no women were raped during the Hamas assault, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You can’t make this stuff up.
How did we arrive at this morally blighted moment? There is no single cause, but our colleges and universities must bear much of the blame. Once beacons of truth, free expression and open-ended inquiry, they have been become indoctrination camps worthy of Mao and Pol Pot. What they now teach, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is cultural totalitarianism.
“Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason,” Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind (in 1987!). “It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power…We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.”
Among the millions marching for ‘Palestine’ are ostensibly well- educated college students, some of whom spearheaded the recent attacks on Jews on campuses. But it’s not only students. The moral rot is systemic.
This week, more than 100 faculty members of that once-elite institution known as Harvard denounce duniversity president Claudine Gay for daring to issue an anodyne statement opposing antisemitism; they claimed she was curtailing free speech.
Individual scholars at various institutions have been outspoken in support of Hamas’ brutality. Cornell professor of history Russell Rickford, for example, told a cheering throng of Palestinian supporters that news of the murders, rapes, beheadings and incineration of infants committed on October 7th was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Chastised by his employer, Rickford later issued a lukewarm apology, but who would give it credence?
Other marchers have proudly hoisted ‘Queers for Palestine’ placards, a laughable display of ignorance on several levels. For starters, merely to hold such a sign (let alone to be caught in flagrante delicto) in Gaza City, Ramallah, Baghdad, Damascus or virtually anywhere in Muslimdom would likely lead to a swift act of defenestration.
And then there are the social justice commandos — hyper-sensitive people ‘triggered’ by every perceived ‘micro-aggression’ or ‘violent’ insult. Invoke the wrong pronoun in addressing ‘they/them,’ and you’re liable to provoke a human rights complaint. But they have no trouble celebrating maniacal terrorists, who gleefully sodomize grandmothers in wheelchairs, and subject young women to serial rape, decapitate them on camera, and then send the videos to parents.
Of course, no angry rally speech — no chant, social media post, or press interview — has been complete without multiple invocations of the word ‘Palestine.’ As if there actually were such a place, or it could be magically wished into existence by mere incantation. Deploying this term is at once a mind game and a perversion of language, because at no time in history has there been a nation ruled by Arabs called Palestine. It is a make-believe country for, as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir bravely acknowledged, a make-believe people, invented by the KGB in 1964, using its hand-picked stooge, Yasir Arafat — a native Egyptian.
It gets worse. The war on reason — the intellectual death spiral of our colleges and universities — has been underway for more than thirty years. Today, the jack-booted brigades of wokeism — drunk on moral relativism and the denial of objective truth — have infiltrated and taken power in our major institutions, corporations, labour unions, the civil service, public agencies, the media, and artistic communities. As writer Bari Weiss noted in a recent speech, in the topsy-turvy progressive universe, colour blindness has been replaced with race obsession; ideas with identity; debate with denunciation; persuasion with public shaming; and the rule of law with the fury of the mob.
The validity of Weiss’s observation was confirmed last week on, appropriately enough, TikTok, which comedian Sacha Baron Cohen aptly said was creating “the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.” Online, someone stumbled upon Osama bin Laden’s 2002 Letter to America, which attempted to justify 9/11 by accusing the U. S. government of being in the pocket of, naturally, the Jews, and therefore complicit in bombing Palestinians home. And before you could say ‘protocols of the elders of Zion,’ fevered TikTokers had experienced a life-altering epiphany, and concluded that Osama was actually a victim — and therefore, automatically, the good guy — and America was the satanic oppressor. In short, a perfect illustration of the historical ignorance and moral obtuseness that plagues Millennials and GenZ.
As a snapshot of our current predicament, the TikTok episode should be framed.
Literally unspeakable crimes were committed on October 7th. We don’t really have a vocabulary that can fully capture the butchery. The savagery of Hamas out-ISISed ISIS, no small achievement. But the response of the vox populi — the millions savouring these atrocities as a victory for ‘the resistance’— testifies eloquently, tragically, to how damaged the West’s moral compass has become. Jews are always society’s coal mine canary, and the epidemic of Jew-hate we are now seeing marks a decisive turning, what Joe Biden likes to call an inflection point. Our civilization is breaking down, and it is likely to get worse, before it gets worse.