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It may be genocide, but it won’t be stopped
It is clear from the ICJ’s ruling that it is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza all the more distressing. But the court did deliver a devastating blow to the mystique Israel has used since its founding: it made the word genocide, when applied to Israel, credible.
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The dream of a Palestinian narrative
For legitimate reasons, the mainstream media today is struggling to maintain an audience and set political agendas as it did in the past. Young people no longer read establishment newspapers or watch CNN or CBC in the evenings. They now rely on social media for their news; they are interested in watching Palestinians document their lives.
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Gaza and Canada’s refugee double standard
The different treatment of Ukrainian and Palestinian refugees exposes a clear double standard. The Trudeau government’s response to Ukraine was swift and comprehensive. There was no cap on how many could apply and they did not need to have Canadian relatives. Ottawa eventually received 1,189,320 applications from Ukrainians and approved 936,293, with 210,178 arriving in Canada.
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The four horsemen of Gaza’s apocalypse
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East—Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk—have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East.
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The global crisis of representation intensifies
The fates of electoralism and militarism are entwined. In conditions of renewed cold war, the choices on offer and the potential range of policies and programmes are constrained by national security considerations and the shifting alignments of bloc politics. The voice of constituencies who believe that peace and development should be the priority remain unrepresented.
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The case for genocide
Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
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Canada has gone from complicity through silence to active participation in genocide
The international community has two paths towards normalizing shipping through the Red Sea: intervene to stop an ongoing genocide, or intervene by punishing a country already devastated by decades of Western interventionism and war in the hopes that it will force their military to disengage. That choice seems like an obvious one.
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A poem by Leila Marshy: ‘Kinship’
A new poem by Leila Marshy, a Montréaler of Palestinian-Newfoundland heritage. Her stories and poetry have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. Marshy works as a freelance writer and editor. The Philistine (Linda Leith Publishing, 2018) is her first novel.
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Hezbollah still a useful bogeyman for Israel and the US
The Israeli state is rightly concerned about the possibility of large-scale attacks from the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. Much is made of the group’s links to Iran, Israel’s former ally and current Middle East competitor. In the subjective world of realpolitik, good and evil are defined by whether or not a given state supports the actions of another.
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Events in Iraq and Niger put spotlight on Canadian troops abroad
The fact that Canada has soldiers stationed overseas, in countries including Iraq and Niger, almost never comes up in domestic political discourse. It is rarely covered in Canadian media. It isn’t a topic at debates. No major political party runs on bringing Canadian soldiers home. As Owen Schalk argues, Canadians should start asking why that is.