Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are being accused of antisemitism or fired from their jobs because they dare to criticize the State of Israel, call it an apartheid state, and denounce the genocide of the Palestinians. May they rest assured: they are in good company, because if Einstein were alive today he would be on the front lines demonstrating with them.

After a year of bombardment, and with all eyes on the US presidential election, Gaza has become exactly what Naomi Klein and Jonathan Glazer feared—part of the soundtrack to everyday life, background noise we can all too easily tune out. But while life goes on as normal on our side of the walls, the genocide continues, barely within earshot.

All across the country our political leaders are getting behind coercive intervention as the best possible response to the ongoing opioid epidemic. We are meant to believe that this is a bold, commonsense approach set to change everything. But forced treatment is not new in Canada. It’s already an integral and growing part of our health care systems.

Conservative MPs have tarred pharmacare as a “radical plan” that will rob unionized workers of their existing workplace coverage, trying to whip up hysteria about health benefits disappearing and private insurance plans being abolished. Since the Pharmacare Act became law, Poilievre and his party have doubled down on these scare tactics.

Even as the Canada Soccer drone spying scandal dominated news at the Olympics and apparently raised the most fundamental questions about ethics and harm, the Israeli national soccer team was still permitted by FIFA to compete in the Games. This, despite the fact that Israel was then (as it is now) conducting a genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza.

According to a recent report by Axios, for the first time, the Biden-Harris administration is explicitly threatening to suspend military aid to Israel unless some very specific conditions are met. These conditions amount to “the most wide-ranging and comprehensive list of US demands from Israel since the beginning of the war.”

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award established by English PEN in memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy named British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah a Writer of Courage, with whom she would share her award.

Somewhere in Western newsrooms and political backrooms, there must be an instruction manual or playbook entitled “How to make accusations of antisemitism with hardly any facts.” I imagine that Steve Paikin got hold of it and employed it to write his latest column. I am afraid that the piece is seriously lacking in intellectual honesty.

The mass killing operations of Israel are there for all to see but the military objectives of the Zionist onslaught have not been met. Even in the confined quarters of the Gaza enclave, a year of unrestrained criminality hasn’t subdued the armed resistance. Even if all out regional conflict takes place with direct US involvement, imperialism will reap what it sows.

There is no greater example of human agency at this moment than the resilience of Palestinians against Israel’s attempt to erase life, culture and history in Gaza. If there is any lesson to draw, it is from this resilience, which has reshaped our perceptions of the liberal international order and inspired young people around the world to resist the damage we have created and condoned.