Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates us from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces: “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Following the Danish example and hoping that playing along will win us favours is unlikely to produce significant dividends. If Trump’s bluster and threats force Canadian leaders to realize this and to reconsider the nature of their relationship with our southern partner, in a perverse way he might even end up doing us some good.

In an historic victory for grassroots resistance, an Italian court has set a precedent by recognizing moral grounds for defying state violence. On December 12, 2024 a Bologna court ruled that members of Làbas, a social centre in Italy’s most left-wing city, acted out of “particular social and moral value” when they resisted a violent eviction by militarized police in 2017.

From gasoline to housing to groceries to concert tickets to fertilizer, the average Canadian can no longer afford a comfortable life, and everyone knows it. Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar expose the details of the current crisis in a new book, The Big Fix, and propose solutions to bring the country back to a more inclusive economy that allows for better competition and fairer pricing.

More information has been revealed about why the University of Alberta decided to replace “equity, diversity, and inclusion” initiatives with a “new framework” called “access, community, and belonging” (ACB). It is clearer than ever that the impetus for this move was political and ultimately aimed at placating the province’s far-right politicians.

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.

Canadians today will continue to love Americans but recoil at the actions of the American government. Trump, on the other hand, sees an American greatness that should be exported and has thus stumbled into an historical fixation that has laid largely dormant since the Treaty of Ghent. But Canadians didn’t want to be Americans then, and we still don’t today.

Marxism is in the throes of a great intellectual renewal worldwide reinforced by the ongoing capitalist crisis and the intellectual and political exhaustion of liberalism, neoliberalism, postmodernism and even cultural studies. But now in the face of the rise of China and the world capitalist crisis Marxism and Marxists are being forced to reconsider their own history.

The decline of the Liberals is part of an international trend where the political centre finds it harder and harder to hold off challenges from the populist right. The inability of the Biden-Harris administration to forge an effective alternative to Trump is an obvious case in point. The Conservatives in Canada are poised to benefit from Trump’s victory.

While Barrick faces an intense challenge from the Malian government, the company is unlikely to relinquish its investments on the continent. And, as last year’s court decision shows, Canada’s government and judicial system appear committed to protecting the overseas operations of Canadian mining firms, no matter how severe the allegations against them.