9 Comments

The RCMP is a Canadian disgrace. It has not only failed MMIW but women in general, mother not just sex workers. It has killed people with mental health issues including a guy running naked in Calgary in January (where was he hiding a weapon?!), shipped Canadians off to Syria for torture. It has even failed to deal with sexual abuse of its own female AND male staff. There are class action lawsuits in both cases of female and male staff.

So, ya why should we trust them when it comes to children.

Expand full comment

Teenagers can obsess over ideas and plan and scheme with each other to commit atrocities in service of these ideas. Just because their moral compasses are still forming and their political views are still being shaped does not mean they're incapable of carrying out terrorism. The courts will decide if the evidence is there to warrant the charges, but this part of Nora's argument is quite weak.

And whatever the legal definition of this alleged crime, the targeting of Jews in Canada is a scary prospect, and I see no reason to spend so many words downplaying it.

On the other hand, there is good reason to distrust the police in general and the RCMP specifically as Nora says. And while we wait to see, through the courts, what the evidence is, Nora is correct that journalists should be doing a better job covering Canada's complicity in Israel's ongoing massacre of the Palestinians.

Expand full comment
author

Well so far, there is a single person arrested on terrorism charges which doesn't pass the first test of planning and scheming -- I agree that terrorism probably does need to have more than one person planning to carry out a plot but that isn't how it's been prosecuted so, fine, we'll see what the evidence is, obviously, and I betcha it's weak.

But to say that my argument downplays targeting Jew is unfair. A hate crime is a hate crime and I state that plainly. Why are we so obessed with things always being even more bad than our already established definitions for what is bad?

Expand full comment

While I agree with the general ideas of your article, It would be better not to say Palestine is the worst ethnic cleansing in decades. It unfortunately has a lot of competition and it’s too easy to dismiss your whole argument over a minor mistake in wording like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_cleansing_campaigns

Expand full comment
author

What one has been worse? Not just about sheer numbers but also in how fast it's all happened.

Expand full comment

Ok, this is what I expressly didn’t want to happen and was warning about - an argument about whether it’s the worst - so I’m going to bow out. My point is that it detracts from the point and leads to arguments like this.

Expand full comment
author

I was genuinely curious because I can't think of a situation that's similar. Sudan right now has more internally displaced people, but that's mostly because their population is larger. The Rohingya have experienced terrible ethnic cleansing, but it's been stretched out over years. But I'm not interested in being hyperbolic so if you or anyone had something in mind I'm not thinking about, i'd be happy to hear it (not you Hans if you're bowing out, I respect that)

Expand full comment

This genocide has been ongoing since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were sent on a force march out of the country in the heat of June without food and water. Another 150,000 were expelled in 1967. Palestinian deaths are at least 10 times those of Israeli deaths each year.

What is most significant about this genocide is that, like the Holocaust it is being perpetrated by a country that claims a place among western democracies. Israel is not an unstable dictatorship. It claims to be the light onto nations.

This genocide like few before it is being televised.

The horror is not all about the numbers.

Expand full comment

Your link lists events that span years and decades. We're only a couple months in to an ongoing catastrophe that has decimated an entire area home to over 2 million, and all of its critical infrastructure. We have yet to see the true impact of this as it's ongoing and there will be knock-on effects beyond the ongoing killing, so I don't think quibbling over where this ranks is appropriate.

Expand full comment