They seemed cocooned within a parallel world: one where all sin could be neatly attributed to Israel, and where the Palestinians and Hamas were pure and blameless.
As I read, I can't help but think that we have failed in our teaching of history, here in Canada. The Social Studies I grew up with did literally nothing to provide me with context to understand the general history of the Levant, or of this conflict. I did not learn some context until college, and through my own readings of experienced journalists. Into that lack of historical context drops unreliable reporting, social media frenzy, abundant conspiracy theories, and the desire of young and old people alike to feel like they are 'doing something.' The human impulse to do something is honourable. The lack of discernment around information sources is concerning.
The perspectives shared by the protesters at the 'pro-Palestinian' rally reveals a parallel to, and inevitable progression, of Chris Selley's wise observation (often quoted by Matt):
“The Liberals genuinely believe they are the kind of people who’d never do the thing they are currently doing.”
Similarly, revealed by Adam's interviews with the protesters, to varying degrees they sincerely believe that the events of October 7th:
a) never happened at all; or
b) happened but were carried out by Israel as a false flag operation; or
b) happened and were carried out by Hamas, but were completely or partially justified; and/or
c) happened and were carried out by Hamas, but were exaggerated by Israel.
Supporters of Hamas and/or the Palestinian single state cause can, will, and do deny objective reality, because they CHOOSE TO BELIEVE they themselves are good, compassionate people supporting the noble, innocent, oppressed Palestinian victims. They also CHOOSE TO BELIEVE that Israel/The Jews are the evil oppressors that need to be stopped/vanquished/eradicated.
The really tragic, horrifying thing is that many of these protesters are closer than they think to being willing to hurt or even kill Jews themselves, given the chance, out of their warped, distorted sense of moral justification. At the minimum, nearly everyone protesting believes that Israel/The Jews deserve the suffering they've endured to date, or will endure in the future.
One could legitimately argue there are some supporters of Israel who also live in varying degrees of this self-deluding mental state; flipping the above descriptions around to fit their narrative.
The reality is this is a horrific and historic blood feud without any real parallel in our world, with objective atrocities committed again and again on both sides for centuries. There really are no good guys or bad guys, there are only less worse guys - ON BOTH SIDES. From my perspective, the Israeli/Jewish side appears to be (by far) the lesser of the two evils, but that is not the same as saying that everything they've done to the Palestinian people is justified. Less bad is still awful.
It is my solemn wish and prayer that this current ceasefire Trump is shamelessly taking credit for will lead to a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
My historical knowledge and current observations tell me this will not be the case. The hate on both sides remains focused and intense, and they are only biding time to reload and rebuild their arsenals to renew hostilities until the entire region is laid to waste, littered with the bodies of Jewish & Palestinian men, women, and children. If this were not so, I would be eternally thankful.
Great summation, and I love how you tied in Selley's iconic statement about the LPC. I think this whole conflict, more than anything else, shows us the dangers of misinformation - and the ease with which it takes hold. These aren't terrible people. They're useful idiots. They just don't have the depth of knowledge on the topic to be skeptical of Hamas' claims and they are looking to buttress a narrative - that the Western World is evil.
I have no doubt that Israel has some pretty dirty hands and they probably don't play very nicely at times. I also understand that the whole point of terrorism is resistance in an asymmetrical situation. Hamas can't openly fight Israel, so they "resist" with terror.
The problem is that October 7th wasn't just a poke in the chest from a particularly rowdy partygoer. It significantly bloodied Israel's nose. That kind of thing demands an OVERWHELMING response. I support Israel's RIGHT to deliver that OVERWHELMING response.
Hamas is the problem here. It's Hamas that insists on putting Palestinians in the crossfire, controlling them with fear, violence and hoarding support. They build tunnel networks with scarce resources and fire missiles from hospitals and schools. They strap bombs to women and children and preach never ending hate.
Their first official act as Israel withdrew from some territories was to round up their rivals and publicly execute them.
I have spent time in the Middle East and the only hate I saw was from the Palestinians. The Israelis treated the situation more as ‘it is what it is’. Prepared to defend and strike back, but not wipe out the Palestinians because they hated them.
My first sentence is a bit facetious way of pushing back on that f.......g narrative that espouses "on one hand ..... on the other hand", that f.......g narrative created and perpetuated by the flamin' academic theoretical naifs who have no idea what they are talking about. I do have first hand encounters with Islam in two countries on the periphery of the Middle East. I have been following closely the events and politics in the Middle East for decades out of general interest. There is absolutely no moral equivalency between the two sides. I entirely agree with your take, and so should many more.
It's weird that all these goofs don't seem to have a lick of concern for the various genocides of black Africans and colonization being committed by Arab Muslims in several African countries (or the Syrian civil war that killed an order of magnitude more people).
It's almost like they're not actually against that kind of thing until they spot a Jew.
I must say that I would likely have not had the patience to put up with such rabid and ugly racism, not to mention the incredible level of sheer ignorance demonstrated by these people.
I hope that CSIS and the RCMP start undertaking discrete investigations of the protest organizers, in order to determine the extent of their links to the Hamas terrorists.
- - - - - - -
The Wilson Center has published a very helpful backgrounder regarding Hamas. Among other things, the Center's scholars acknowledged that the founding of Hamas came in reaction to increasingly brutal Israeli policies in the 1980s. However, they also the following statement made by the organization:
QUOTE
Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It has called on members of the other two Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity—to accept Islamic rule in the Middle East. “It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror,” it decreed. Hamas also rejected any prospect of peace or coexistence with the state of Israel. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”
END QUOTE
There is NO ambiguity in the totalitarian extremism conveyed in this and other Hamas declarations.
Having said all that, I happen to believe that the extremists in Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government are as unsettling in their own extremist religious and political views. Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, told Arab lawmakers in the Knesset in mid-2021 that:
QUOTE
"You're here by mistake, it's a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and didn't throw you out in 1948."
END QUOTE
C.f.: Spiro, Amy (13 October 2021). "Smotrich at Knesset: Ben-Gurion should have "finished the job", thrown out Arabs". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 11 December 2021. [via Wikipedia]
This was one of the less blood-curdling positions Smotrich has taken throughout his career.
Pity the people of both Israel and Palestine for having to suffer such men as the terrorists of Hamas and Smotrich.
I heap scorn on all public protest (include picket lines), not that they shouldn't have the right to do so, but
1) Anrgy mobs only incite emotions rather than intelligent discourse
2) if I cared about their alleged cause, I would already know more about it than most of them do. Their actions do not build awareness
3) Who the hell do they think they are by at the least inconviencing people or at the worst harming employment and businesses, imposing security costs or in the cause of Thunberg, endangering lives?
They are not only cocooned, but also devoid of intelligence and independent thinking. You are lucky they did not know you or it could have been dangerous. Terry Newman of the Post tried to report the Montreal march but was stopped by the thuggery of the marchers and the ostensible protection the Montreal police. Thanks for going into the lion's den. I bet none of them have seen Hamas summarily executing people in the streets over the last couple of days? Ceasefire? Nope. Not if there in ONE hamasshole living.
Interesting. The pro-Palestinian rally attendees do not contest the principle that their views, like all views on issues where people disagree, need to be supported by evidence and sound reasoning. Where they diverge from the other side is on the question of what qualifies as evidence. Given what they're inclined to include, and what they're inclined to reject, it's logical to infer that the views to which they're so attached preceded any rigorous, impartial investigation of relevant evidence. What's cited in the reported interviews isn't a representative cross-section of available information but a carefully chosen subset that, if it doesn't actually confirm the wisdom of the rally attendees' judgment, is conveniently compatible with it.
This of course is a form of intellectual fraud and bad faith. I don't pretend to know what really formed the views of these particular rally attendees, just that whatever is was owes little debt to scrupulous empirical investigation. Is their conviction rooted in ethnic antagonism, antisemitism, or some other form of prejudice? Simple confusion? Being information-siloed by activists and/or propagandists in just the way needed to engineer such views? Who knows; maybe sociologists of the future will conduct enough in-depth surveys to shed some light on the matter. What's clear now is what's been known to moral philosophy for centuries: it is always unethical to believe something on the basis of insufficient evidence, and unethical and hypocritical to knowingly avoid evidence that might oblige you to question, and possibly even revise your views.
As for deliberately manufacturing false evidence, there's no defense. The prohibition against doing that was inscribed on stone tablets two and a half millennia ago.
I can see a couple hundred people being persuaded by flawed moral logic and misinformation, but how do we account for the mainstream narrative that Israel committed a genocide and the mapping of settler colonialism onto a regional conflict perpetrated by an Islamist prison gang (Hamas)? How have so many been fooled, including our own prime minister?
The readers comments are indicative of the wide range of opinions, information and misinformation that this topic breeds. Those that even have any inkling of history know that this Middle East Muddle is not going to ever be solved. There is no purchase to again go through why there will never be lasting peace in the Middle East, except to study the long history of the Jewish race (only 15M in the world identifying as being Jews) over millennia, the sovereign state of Israel being recognised in 1947, the hatred of the Arab nations of the Jews and Israel, and the rag-tag populace of Arabs who identify as “Palestinians.” The history of the Jewish race from as far back as Abraham, and before, to the present day, is one of unmitigated persecution, indescribable suffering and extraordinary courage of Jews to continue to be able to repulse all enemies by physical force when necessary and politically. This is the lot of World Jewry and will continue forever. It will never end, unfortunately.
Adam, always like your columns, especially your articles on condemning the ruling classes for total lack of insight into the "drug scene" in Canada. Likewise to the unfettered acceptance of immigrants from Islamic countries to Canada. there are those who will point out that the world response to what happened on that October, 7th, the sympathy expressed was, at best "lukewarm" in support of Israel. This was also witnessed in the demonstrations of so called Palestinians in the capitals of Europe, American and Canadian cities and on the college compasses of the western democracies, that unequivocably illustrated deep rooted Islamophobia and that that antisemitism was alive and thriving in the populace of the western democracies. The lies spread by MSM, of "starving" of the Gaza people, even the mouthing of "genocide" was rampant in the MSM and uttered by their ruling classes of the west, including in Canada. It was known that Hamas had been stopping shipments of food and medicines, bound for the Gazan people. But still the attacks on Netanyahu continued. Even the ruling class of the western democracies, Biden and co. plus the MSM condemned Israels' invasion of Gaza, Israels' attack in Qatar of Hamas operatives, and the continuation of the clearing out of Hamas in Gaza. Again the MSM slammed the next wave of Israels invasion of Gaza as OTT and the MSM filled their pages full of anti Bibi and anti-Israel propaganda saying that "Israel has "lost the room," in this matter. The coming of Trump, little changed the attack by the MSM and the ruling classes of the west, whose leaders even went so far as to again resurrect the utterly unobtainable, "two state" solution and unbelievably they announces their support for a "Palestinian State," which was more than delusional, it was fanciful and unrealistic as there is no such sovereign country in the world. That Trump and his team has engineered a cease fire, is frankly amazing, judging by the political forces arraigned against him and his administration
TBH, nothing new here. I would be more interested in some investigative journalism that followed the $$. It seems these groups are coordinated and I understand at least some of the demonstrators have been paid for their . . [ahem] . . . time. also, their messaging seems to have evolved.
As I read, I can't help but think that we have failed in our teaching of history, here in Canada. The Social Studies I grew up with did literally nothing to provide me with context to understand the general history of the Levant, or of this conflict. I did not learn some context until college, and through my own readings of experienced journalists. Into that lack of historical context drops unreliable reporting, social media frenzy, abundant conspiracy theories, and the desire of young and old people alike to feel like they are 'doing something.' The human impulse to do something is honourable. The lack of discernment around information sources is concerning.
Excellent take by a perceptive mind.
Thank you for this article.
The perspectives shared by the protesters at the 'pro-Palestinian' rally reveals a parallel to, and inevitable progression, of Chris Selley's wise observation (often quoted by Matt):
“The Liberals genuinely believe they are the kind of people who’d never do the thing they are currently doing.”
Similarly, revealed by Adam's interviews with the protesters, to varying degrees they sincerely believe that the events of October 7th:
a) never happened at all; or
b) happened but were carried out by Israel as a false flag operation; or
b) happened and were carried out by Hamas, but were completely or partially justified; and/or
c) happened and were carried out by Hamas, but were exaggerated by Israel.
Supporters of Hamas and/or the Palestinian single state cause can, will, and do deny objective reality, because they CHOOSE TO BELIEVE they themselves are good, compassionate people supporting the noble, innocent, oppressed Palestinian victims. They also CHOOSE TO BELIEVE that Israel/The Jews are the evil oppressors that need to be stopped/vanquished/eradicated.
The really tragic, horrifying thing is that many of these protesters are closer than they think to being willing to hurt or even kill Jews themselves, given the chance, out of their warped, distorted sense of moral justification. At the minimum, nearly everyone protesting believes that Israel/The Jews deserve the suffering they've endured to date, or will endure in the future.
One could legitimately argue there are some supporters of Israel who also live in varying degrees of this self-deluding mental state; flipping the above descriptions around to fit their narrative.
The reality is this is a horrific and historic blood feud without any real parallel in our world, with objective atrocities committed again and again on both sides for centuries. There really are no good guys or bad guys, there are only less worse guys - ON BOTH SIDES. From my perspective, the Israeli/Jewish side appears to be (by far) the lesser of the two evils, but that is not the same as saying that everything they've done to the Palestinian people is justified. Less bad is still awful.
It is my solemn wish and prayer that this current ceasefire Trump is shamelessly taking credit for will lead to a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
My historical knowledge and current observations tell me this will not be the case. The hate on both sides remains focused and intense, and they are only biding time to reload and rebuild their arsenals to renew hostilities until the entire region is laid to waste, littered with the bodies of Jewish & Palestinian men, women, and children. If this were not so, I would be eternally thankful.
Great summation, and I love how you tied in Selley's iconic statement about the LPC. I think this whole conflict, more than anything else, shows us the dangers of misinformation - and the ease with which it takes hold. These aren't terrible people. They're useful idiots. They just don't have the depth of knowledge on the topic to be skeptical of Hamas' claims and they are looking to buttress a narrative - that the Western World is evil.
I have no doubt that Israel has some pretty dirty hands and they probably don't play very nicely at times. I also understand that the whole point of terrorism is resistance in an asymmetrical situation. Hamas can't openly fight Israel, so they "resist" with terror.
The problem is that October 7th wasn't just a poke in the chest from a particularly rowdy partygoer. It significantly bloodied Israel's nose. That kind of thing demands an OVERWHELMING response. I support Israel's RIGHT to deliver that OVERWHELMING response.
Hamas is the problem here. It's Hamas that insists on putting Palestinians in the crossfire, controlling them with fear, violence and hoarding support. They build tunnel networks with scarce resources and fire missiles from hospitals and schools. They strap bombs to women and children and preach never ending hate.
Their first official act as Israel withdrew from some territories was to round up their rivals and publicly execute them.
What is Israel to do?
If there were much less hate or no hate from the Muslim side, there would be much less hate or no hate from the Israeli / Jewish side.
In its founding tenets and its basis and how it is practiced, Islam no "religion of peace".
You can go and confer with any number of moderate muslims, they will tell you how they are tagged and persecuted for being moderate.
I have spent time in the Middle East and the only hate I saw was from the Palestinians. The Israelis treated the situation more as ‘it is what it is’. Prepared to defend and strike back, but not wipe out the Palestinians because they hated them.
My first sentence is a bit facetious way of pushing back on that f.......g narrative that espouses "on one hand ..... on the other hand", that f.......g narrative created and perpetuated by the flamin' academic theoretical naifs who have no idea what they are talking about. I do have first hand encounters with Islam in two countries on the periphery of the Middle East. I have been following closely the events and politics in the Middle East for decades out of general interest. There is absolutely no moral equivalency between the two sides. I entirely agree with your take, and so should many more.
Great reporting and hope to see more of this from The Line.
As a follow-up, The Line should report from TMU or Concordia and interview some of the real crazies.
Or infiltrate the belly of the beast... a Cupe meeting
Wicked. And true. You know.
It's weird that all these goofs don't seem to have a lick of concern for the various genocides of black Africans and colonization being committed by Arab Muslims in several African countries (or the Syrian civil war that killed an order of magnitude more people).
It's almost like they're not actually against that kind of thing until they spot a Jew.
And that is why it is antisemitism.
For how Hamas sowed the wind, so did it and all the Palestinians reap the inevitable whirlwind.
Or, to use the current idiom, FAFO
Thank you to Adam Zivo for this report.
I must say that I would likely have not had the patience to put up with such rabid and ugly racism, not to mention the incredible level of sheer ignorance demonstrated by these people.
I hope that CSIS and the RCMP start undertaking discrete investigations of the protest organizers, in order to determine the extent of their links to the Hamas terrorists.
- - - - - - -
The Wilson Center has published a very helpful backgrounder regarding Hamas. Among other things, the Center's scholars acknowledged that the founding of Hamas came in reaction to increasingly brutal Israeli policies in the 1980s. However, they also the following statement made by the organization:
QUOTE
Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It has called on members of the other two Abrahamic faiths—Judaism and Christianity—to accept Islamic rule in the Middle East. “It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror,” it decreed. Hamas also rejected any prospect of peace or coexistence with the state of Israel. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”
END QUOTE
There is NO ambiguity in the totalitarian extremism conveyed in this and other Hamas declarations.
C.f.: Doctrine of Hamas, Wilson Center, 23 October 2023, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas.
- - - - - - -
Having said all that, I happen to believe that the extremists in Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government are as unsettling in their own extremist religious and political views. Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, told Arab lawmakers in the Knesset in mid-2021 that:
QUOTE
"You're here by mistake, it's a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and didn't throw you out in 1948."
END QUOTE
C.f.: Spiro, Amy (13 October 2021). "Smotrich at Knesset: Ben-Gurion should have "finished the job", thrown out Arabs". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 11 December 2021. [via Wikipedia]
This was one of the less blood-curdling positions Smotrich has taken throughout his career.
Pity the people of both Israel and Palestine for having to suffer such men as the terrorists of Hamas and Smotrich.
I heap scorn on all public protest (include picket lines), not that they shouldn't have the right to do so, but
1) Anrgy mobs only incite emotions rather than intelligent discourse
2) if I cared about their alleged cause, I would already know more about it than most of them do. Their actions do not build awareness
3) Who the hell do they think they are by at the least inconviencing people or at the worst harming employment and businesses, imposing security costs or in the cause of Thunberg, endangering lives?
They are not only cocooned, but also devoid of intelligence and independent thinking. You are lucky they did not know you or it could have been dangerous. Terry Newman of the Post tried to report the Montreal march but was stopped by the thuggery of the marchers and the ostensible protection the Montreal police. Thanks for going into the lion's den. I bet none of them have seen Hamas summarily executing people in the streets over the last couple of days? Ceasefire? Nope. Not if there in ONE hamasshole living.
Thank you fr the first hand insight Adam.
Thank you so much Adam. A great description of the buffet of Canadian opinion.
For a bit of context
English and French are the first and second languages in Canada.
Mandarin is the most common third spoken language in Canada as a whole (closely followed by Punjabi).
But in Ottawa, the third most common spoken language is Arabic.
This might explain why the Ottawa-based government gives so much credence to pro-Hamas viewpoints.
Bullseye. And thus the Canadian foreign policy goes on into a deep and nasty ditch, pushed in by the halfwit we again have as a PM.
Interesting. The pro-Palestinian rally attendees do not contest the principle that their views, like all views on issues where people disagree, need to be supported by evidence and sound reasoning. Where they diverge from the other side is on the question of what qualifies as evidence. Given what they're inclined to include, and what they're inclined to reject, it's logical to infer that the views to which they're so attached preceded any rigorous, impartial investigation of relevant evidence. What's cited in the reported interviews isn't a representative cross-section of available information but a carefully chosen subset that, if it doesn't actually confirm the wisdom of the rally attendees' judgment, is conveniently compatible with it.
This of course is a form of intellectual fraud and bad faith. I don't pretend to know what really formed the views of these particular rally attendees, just that whatever is was owes little debt to scrupulous empirical investigation. Is their conviction rooted in ethnic antagonism, antisemitism, or some other form of prejudice? Simple confusion? Being information-siloed by activists and/or propagandists in just the way needed to engineer such views? Who knows; maybe sociologists of the future will conduct enough in-depth surveys to shed some light on the matter. What's clear now is what's been known to moral philosophy for centuries: it is always unethical to believe something on the basis of insufficient evidence, and unethical and hypocritical to knowingly avoid evidence that might oblige you to question, and possibly even revise your views.
As for deliberately manufacturing false evidence, there's no defense. The prohibition against doing that was inscribed on stone tablets two and a half millennia ago.
I can see a couple hundred people being persuaded by flawed moral logic and misinformation, but how do we account for the mainstream narrative that Israel committed a genocide and the mapping of settler colonialism onto a regional conflict perpetrated by an Islamist prison gang (Hamas)? How have so many been fooled, including our own prime minister?
Thanks for this insightful piece.
The readers comments are indicative of the wide range of opinions, information and misinformation that this topic breeds. Those that even have any inkling of history know that this Middle East Muddle is not going to ever be solved. There is no purchase to again go through why there will never be lasting peace in the Middle East, except to study the long history of the Jewish race (only 15M in the world identifying as being Jews) over millennia, the sovereign state of Israel being recognised in 1947, the hatred of the Arab nations of the Jews and Israel, and the rag-tag populace of Arabs who identify as “Palestinians.” The history of the Jewish race from as far back as Abraham, and before, to the present day, is one of unmitigated persecution, indescribable suffering and extraordinary courage of Jews to continue to be able to repulse all enemies by physical force when necessary and politically. This is the lot of World Jewry and will continue forever. It will never end, unfortunately.
Adam, always like your columns, especially your articles on condemning the ruling classes for total lack of insight into the "drug scene" in Canada. Likewise to the unfettered acceptance of immigrants from Islamic countries to Canada. there are those who will point out that the world response to what happened on that October, 7th, the sympathy expressed was, at best "lukewarm" in support of Israel. This was also witnessed in the demonstrations of so called Palestinians in the capitals of Europe, American and Canadian cities and on the college compasses of the western democracies, that unequivocably illustrated deep rooted Islamophobia and that that antisemitism was alive and thriving in the populace of the western democracies. The lies spread by MSM, of "starving" of the Gaza people, even the mouthing of "genocide" was rampant in the MSM and uttered by their ruling classes of the west, including in Canada. It was known that Hamas had been stopping shipments of food and medicines, bound for the Gazan people. But still the attacks on Netanyahu continued. Even the ruling class of the western democracies, Biden and co. plus the MSM condemned Israels' invasion of Gaza, Israels' attack in Qatar of Hamas operatives, and the continuation of the clearing out of Hamas in Gaza. Again the MSM slammed the next wave of Israels invasion of Gaza as OTT and the MSM filled their pages full of anti Bibi and anti-Israel propaganda saying that "Israel has "lost the room," in this matter. The coming of Trump, little changed the attack by the MSM and the ruling classes of the west, whose leaders even went so far as to again resurrect the utterly unobtainable, "two state" solution and unbelievably they announces their support for a "Palestinian State," which was more than delusional, it was fanciful and unrealistic as there is no such sovereign country in the world. That Trump and his team has engineered a cease fire, is frankly amazing, judging by the political forces arraigned against him and his administration
TBH, nothing new here. I would be more interested in some investigative journalism that followed the $$. It seems these groups are coordinated and I understand at least some of the demonstrators have been paid for their . . [ahem] . . . time. also, their messaging seems to have evolved.