Happy birthday, NATO!
This month the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrates its 75th. And any individual would consider themselves fortunate it they were in as good shape. NATO first saw the light of…
International
Biden loses Ireland
The U.S. departed almost radically from an habitual practice on a resolution at a United Nations Security Council meeting Monday. It didn’t vote in Israel’s favour. The Council passed a…
Happiness is… (2024 edition)
Overall, Canada ranks 15th in the World Happiness Report, although it is first among nations with populations of more than 30 million. However, when the happiness of citizens under age…
“Never again” must mean never again by anyone, against anyone
Maximilian Hess is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in London. He calls himself the child of an American Jewish and Catholic German couple and said antisemitism has…
Claims of antisemitism used to defend Israel’s atrocities
I understand people who believe that Israel should defend its lands against armed attacks and fervently assert the country has a right to a peaceful existence. But I sympathize with…
Canada profiting from death and destruction
This country was once known as a peacemaker and peacekeeper. Now it is better known for selling instruments of death and destruction. As occurs in other sectors, profit-seeking arms dealers…
How Trump unleashed Iran
In 1953, Iran’s democratic government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq was toppled by a military coup backed by the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service. Mosaddeq had nationalized…
Why must the Palestinians beg for a country in their own land?
A seemingly eccentric question, one that shouldn’t have to be asked, yet it does because that is the bizarre situation the Palestinians find themselves in. Indeed, many find themselves refugees…
7,000 children, 60 journalists, 130 UN aid workers … enough?
On September 11th, 2001, the Islamist extremist group al-Qaeda carried out one of the most dramatic terrorist attacks in history on the United States. It knocked down two phallic symbols…
Dr Gabor Mate – belated respects due
In the 1960s, Gabor Mate was a brave young man standing up to bullies and stating unpopular ideas. Now Dr. Mate, he is still a man of conscience not afraid…
Seven moral principles
Professor Robert Reich describes meeting with students to discuss tragic events in Gaza and Israel. It was a mixed group, some Jewish, some Palestinian, and some with other backgrounds. They…
Poland comes in from the cold
It’s all up and down with democracy these days as right-wing populists, some bordering on fascism, come and go. The most prominent case, of course, was our great neighbour to…
COP28 and the great transition
Maybe it took an oilman to do it. When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates was appointed President of the UN Climate Change 2023 Conference (COP28), environmentalists…
The morality of tyrants
I have long been intrigued at how men who inflict torture and murder on their fellow human beings can consider themselves moral leaders. History is replete with authoritarians of various…
Chinese at the border
Perhaps the most famous border in the world is the one along the Rio Grande that separates Mexico from the United States. It is almost certainly the most popular. U.S.…
Between the sea and the Jordan …
Being an admirer of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I read with interest a recent column of his in The New York Times about the Palestine situation. One thing that particularly…
The two-state fallacy
The Hamas attack on Jewish settlers in Israel has evoked a cascade of sympathy around the world, for the victims and for Israelis and Jews generally, and rightly so. How…
A Gaza-Canadian analogy
Reading about the circumstances of the Palestinians in Gaza, I was reminded of a piece of our own history: the infamous pass system. In the late 19th and early 20th…
A loss for illiberalism, a gain for democracy
Generations of Communism is not the best training for democracy. So perhaps we shouldn’t have expected that when the Soviet Union collapsed under its own dead weight, the countries that…