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…
International
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…
Are our hands clean?
One of the best articles I have read about the Hamas-Israel war is The New York Times “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive” by Peter…
Jewish wisdom; Gentile folly
Reading The New York Times, as I do every morning (the world’s best newspaper), I have encountered a number of articles on the current hostilities in Palestine. I couldn’t help…
Terrorism—weapon of the weak?
Hamas’s invasion of Israel has once again brought attention to the Palestine problem. The routine of Israel oppressing the Palestinians while simultaneously stealing their land has once again been interrupted…
India—too big to hold accountable?
The world isn’t a fair place. The rule of law doesn’t apply globally. Might is often right. This reality overarches Canada’s accusation that the Indian government orchestrated the murder/assassination of…
Talking to China
Winston Churchill is credited with saying “It’s better to jaw-jaw than war-war.” It is very much better indeed when two protagonists are armed with nuclear weapons, say like the U.S.…
The cluster bomb curse
The United States recently took a step towards civilizing war, if war can be in any way termed civilized. Last Friday the US Defence Department made history by destroying the…
Africa’s anti-gay madness—the Christian connection
Uganda recently passed an anti-gay law described by United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk as “probably among the worst of its kind in the world.” Anyone engaging in gay…
Africa’s anti-gay madness—the Christian connection
Uganda recently passed an anti-gay law described by United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk as “probably among the worst of its kind in the world.” Anyone engaging in gay…
A warrant for the world’s “most brazen mobster”
If there has been a knock on the International Criminal Court (ICC) it’s that it has focussed excessively on developing countries. Of the over 50 individuals the court has indicted,…
A warrant for the world’s “most brazen mobster”
If there has been a knock on the International Criminal Court (ICC) it’s that it has focussed excessively on developing countries. Of the over 50 individuals the court has indicted,…
Iran and Saudi Arabia make nice
The Middle East has been an ugly place for some time. It has become humanity’s favourite region for killing each other although Vladimir Putin is attempting to return that honour…
Iran and Saudi Arabia make nice
The Middle East has been an ugly place for some time. It has become humanity’s favourite region for killing each other although Vladimir Putin is attempting to return that honour…