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.

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.

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following reports last month concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

On December 20, 1989, US forces invaded Panama and overthrew the government of Manuel Noriega. Noriega had proven too independent for his one-time sponsors in Washington, who suddenly accused him of drug trafficking and endangering American citizens in the country. Canada was the only nation in the Western Hemisphere to openly support the invasion.

Canada’s hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed even in Israel itself. Nevertheless, activists in Canada have been labelled antisemitic by university administrations, media outlets, and politicians for saying what Mordechai, a Jewish historian in Israel, documents clearly: that Israel is committing genocide, and Canada is complicit.

This is a crucial period during which countries must rapidly reduce emissions to limit global mean temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Instead, Canada is ramping up military spending and munitions production to meet NATO targets. Allied nations that are the most responsible for global warming have not paid their fair share to address the problem, and are heaping fuel on the fire.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Biden has overridden the US judicial system to grant his son a pardon and Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

The Canadian establishment doggedly enables Israel and finds it advantageous for supporters of the Palestinian struggle to be contained. However, the lobby’s role in equating Jewish identity with Zionism and labelling opposition to this colonialist ideology as antisemitic is a potent factor that we should not underestimate.

Like our Palestinian allies in this struggle, we refuse to be patronized by Canadian policymakers. We refuse to be told that we are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we refuse to be told that we lack understanding by politicians who are in fact contradicting themselves. Our demands are simple and we will not stop pressing for them until they are realized.

Russia has now fired an experimental hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile at a Ukrainian industrial facility in the city of Dnipro. This raises questions about the West’s policy of incremental escalation in Ukraine, specifically what goals it is meant to achieve, whether those goals are actually achievable, and whether the cost of pursuing those goals may be so high as to render them unwise.