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.

We might ask whether, if Harris had been less adamant in her insistence that “I’m speaking!” and more willing to move on Israel, she might have persuaded enough of Biden’s 2020 voters—not only Muslim Americans, but progressives who campaigned for the Democrats in 2020 but were nauseated by Biden’s policies on Gaza—to support her. Instead, they flipped or stayed home.

In spite of his prime ministerial law-and-order rhetoric, citizen Harper has no time for the International Court of Justice’s conclusions on Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza and Amnesty International on Israeli apartheid. The former PM still considers Israel a credible ally in spite of the IDF’s ongoing campaign of destruction and territorial expansion across the Middle East.

Israel and many of its supporters insist that a wide range of international organizations and bodies are antisemitic. And then Israel doubles down and the outrage against it grows and the outraged are denounced as antisemites. And on and on it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. Perhaps until the “new” antisemitism turns into the “old” antisemitism?