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.

What kind of Institute for Liberal Studies funds a Calgary-based conservative commentator to spread right-wing conspiracy theories to its students about government censorship of the news? Apparently the one at Vancouver Island University does. The irony is that Jen Gerson’s recent talk was actually the least controversial aspect of her appearance.

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.

The cult of personality that the Soviet authorities built around Lenin after his death was fully justified. The revolution of November 1917 really was Lenin’s revolution, and the communist system really was Lenin’s creation. Great impersonal forces matter. But so too does individual agency. The life of Vladimir Lenin proves the point. For good or evil, he changed the path of history.

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.

Yet another Canadian community newspaper chain is going to court under our bankruptcy laws, but again it has nothing to do with it going out of business. As Marc Edge details, this time, it is more a legal power play to force its sale to largely American interests over the objections of its minority owner.

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.

There is something ironic about the National Post lecturing anyone about media bias, as it did recently with a front-page story titled “A more damaging media bias.” As Marc Edge shows, the opposite is true: the extreme level of ownership concentration in Canada has since resulted in a correspondingly extreme conservative media bias.

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.

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.