If Canadians accept the flimsy, speculative pretexts offered by university authorities to crush peaceful protest, we risk the further erosion of our political rights and freedoms. If these rights may be trampled underfoot on university campuses without legal challenge, where are they protected? Constitutional lawyers, don your armour.

The international community’s failure to act on Sudan has left small diasporas to shoulder the lives of millions—exhausted and unable to set down grief, the Sudanese put their lives on the line to get people to care and open a door. Sudan’s future continues to lie with the same vultures that hold a stake in the country’s continued bloodshed.

Those who stand up for just social and economic causes have long faced repression by the Canadian state. In this moment, the struggle for Palestinian liberation is the most unifying cause for people who want to build a better world. For this reason, it is no surprise that anti-genocide activists like Yves Engler are being targeted.

Donald Trump’s failed 2020 Abraham Accords led directly to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. This agreement, initially signed by Israel, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, was ostensibly designed to “recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace in the Middle East and around the world based on mutual understanding and coexistence.”

The human rights situation in Cuba is bad, and about to get worse. Prisoners will be denied basic constitutional rights and reports of abuse and torture will surface. No, we are not talking about treatment of dissidents opposed to the revolutionary government—but rather to the victims of US foreign policy in the tropical gulag of Guantánamo.

Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates us from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces: “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Canadians deserve an Afghanistan Papers of their own. We deserve to know how the occupation functioned internally, what Canadian officials truly thought of events on the ground, and how much they knew about the torture and disappearance of Afghan prisoners. Getting this information, however, has proven more difficult that wringing truths out of Washington.

While Barrick faces an intense challenge from the Malian government, the company is unlikely to relinquish its investments on the continent. And, as last year’s court decision shows, Canada’s government and judicial system appear committed to protecting the overseas operations of Canadian mining firms, no matter how severe the allegations against them.

Meta’s move to stop fact checking is widely seen as the company trying to get out of Trump’s doghouse amid worldwide efforts to regulate it. Meta banned Trump from Facebook in 2020 after he fomented that year’s January 6 insurrection, but announced in 2022 that it would stop fact-checking his speeches ahead of his third presidential bid.

This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages. We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.