The Murder of Alexei Navalny -- The Ambition of Vladimir Putin

Alexei Navalny (centre) and Yulia (right) at a march held in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on 29 February 2020

"A free, peaceful, happy Russia, a beautiful Russia of the future, which my husband dreamed of so much -- that is what we need."

"I want to live in this Russia. I want our children to live in it."

"I want to build it with you [Navalny supporters]."

Yulia Navalnaya, bereaved wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny

"For two years, Ukrainian soldiers have fought for our lands, repelling countless attacks, and liberated roughly half of the [Russian]-occupied territories."

"But this is not a tale about mythical strength and Valhalla. There are losses and injuries. Even wounded soldiers must return to the front -- and they return to a land that will remember every scar on it."

"We are still here. The Russians are still here, standing on foreign land and trying to take more of it."

"The world is still watching."

Anastasiya Nikulina, Ukrainian writer, Lviv, Ukraine

Only a week ago Navalny appeared at a court, appearing fit and healthy, his mood firm, joking and laughing. A day later, he suffered a mysterious calamity while incarcerated in the Arctic penal colony where he is serving 27 remaining years of a 30-year sentence for 'extremism', along with a number of fabricated offences -- his short-lived 47 years suddenly concluded.

 

This was a man whose moral fibre was unbreakable. The second time he was poisoned as a thorn in the side of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, he was saved from impending death, spirited out of Russia by his supporters where German physicians in Berlin concluded that Novichok, a lethal nerve agent, had been administered to him by stealth. After his recuperation, he challenged Russia by returning, and was speedily arrested as promised.

 

He loved Russia, felt it his home, wanted to rescue it from the thugs determined to emulate the Soviet era, and Putin's desire to install himself permanently as Stalin's born-again successor. Navalny's courage and stalwart insistence that Russia could, should and would be saved from the evil dominating it, the corruption, the violence, the inhumanity and the rapacious grip of its current overlords. 

 

A gangland of corrupt politicians, a Kremlin that concurs with the delirious insistence that Russia's heritage in Ukraine supersedes any sovereignty that Ukrainians insists is their right as a state with its own culture, heritage and values. The hegemonic reach of Vladimir Putin's re-acquisition of a Soviet satellite justified his explanation that Russian-speakers in Ukraine needed to be rescued from the neo-Nazi tentacles of the government in Kyiv.

 

When Russia's prison service shocked, yet did not surprise the world with its announcement of the sudden mysterious demise of Navalny of "sudden death syndrome" at the Polar Wolf prison colony, 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow in the Yamalo-Nenets region, Yulia Navalnaya was scheduled to make an appearance at the Munich Security Conference. Suddenly widowed, her acute grief had her question herself about speaking with his death so raw and new.

 

But she did, making an impassioned plea to the audience and to her husband's Russian supporters, that it was incumbent upon them all to help make her husband's dream of a Russia free from Communism, corruption and political coercion. Ukraine's existential struggle to free itself of Moscow's murderous destruction of a sovereign nation unfortunate enough to exist on Russia's border, echoed Yulia Navalnaya's appeal to help effect a different Russia.

 

"I thought, should I stand here before  you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought: what would Alexei have done in my place? And I'm sure that he would have been standing here on this stage", she told her audience. 

Ah yes, Ukraine's plight, defending itself against a rapacious territorial-hungry aggressor utterly lacking conscience, more than willing to sacrifice human lives, both Russian and Ukrainian, and in the process remorselessly destroy towns and cities with their heritage significance; create millions of displaced people and refugees, and plunder the geography of its rightful ownership. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues his dogged canvass of Ukraine's purported democratic allies.

As the first of the dominoes under direct threat of complete absorption by Russia, he endlessly visits capital after capital to speak to their executive branch, to address their parliaments, to relate to them what many are all too aware of; first Ukraine, then the Balkan states, and then an eye from eastern Europe to the western portion. The joint-nations defense forces that is NATO responded with vigour to supply the Ukrainian military with the needed technical hardware to confront the Russian military.

 

A Ukrainian serviceman of the 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine looks on next to a BM-21 Grad multiple launch rocket system near a frontline at an undisclosed location in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, February 4, 2024. REUTERS/Alina Smutko

 

War is an expansive and expensive enterprise. Costly armaments, while wreaking wholesale destruction on a country's infrastructure and geography, let alone its lives, must be replaced expeditiously so the tempo of resistance is not lost and in the best-case scenario defense can be transformed into offensive action when supplies are at the ready. But goodwill and the best of intentions are occasionally expendable when two belligerents manage to hold their own.

The dogged courage of a military to defend its homeland against the violent incursion of a neighbour's malicious disregard for human life that impels it to bomb hospitals, schools, energy sources, a wholesale destruction of a nation, terrorizing the population into a state of final weary acceptance that 'normal' will remain in the dictionary, with no real meaning for them for a long time inspires admiration. One dimmed in time in the ennui of an endless war and exhaustive contributions to keep that war going.

At Munich, Denmark stepped into the breach of Washington's insufficient, tardy and reluctant supply of desperately needed weaponry to counter a much larger military's endless supply of arms from those in its thrall. Denmark, at Munich, pledged its "entire artillery" reserves. "They are asking us for ammunition now, artillery now. From the Danish side, we decided to donate our entire artillery", announced Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. 

The European Union too is pushing its defence industry production in hopes of  aiding Ukraine in holding the line against Russia. And in Russia, news of Navalny's death brought mourners out to the city streets in St.Petersburg, and towns and villages east of the Urals. Impromptu monuments of grief, blossomed, and prayers were said for the courageous hero that Navalny represented to Russians living in poverty. Those gathering in 'illegal' assemblies to express their support for a different Russia risked arrest.

People gather outside the Russian embassy, following the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, reported by prison authorities in Russia's Yamalo-Nenets region where he had been serving his sentence, in Warsaw, Poland, February 16, 2024. Dawid Zuchowicz/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS/File Photo

 

REPLACE UNRWA!

"There's a substantial difference. More than fifteen countries representing more than half a billion dollars have frozen their funding." 

"In our ten years of documenting this, there's not one instance where one of the friends on Facebook, their peers -- most of whom are fellow UNRWA staff, teachers, employees -- said, 'Whoah, Ahmed, I'm shocked that you just glorified Hitler and that you praised the terrorist attack."

"There's not one instance of that. It's the complete opposite, and we've documented that in videos where they liked it, endorsed it, praised it."

"This line about twelve bad apples is just so preposterous."

Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

"[UNRWA took] the recent allegations very, very seriously."

"There's about two million people who depend on our assistance. We have 150 shelters that have become home to a million people who have been displaced."

"We bring food and medicine; we bring medical teams."

Juliette Touma, spokeswoman, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

 

Since October 7's horrors of unrelieved barbarity was visited on the civilian population of Israel; Jews mostly but also Bedouin and foreign farm workers, a sadistic savagery visited upon infants, children, women, men and the elderly, fully revealed in all its macabre, gory details by videos that the perpetrators themselves proudly took of tormenting, mutilating, raping, killing, no one can be ignorant of the Hamas marauders pogrom on southern Israel across the border from Gaza, nor the plight of the abductees taken into Gaza as hostages.

 

Hillel Neuer, a practising lawyer specializing in international law became aware of an opening at UN Watch in 2004. Born in Canada, he attended McGill Law School and became an acolyte of the university's human rights program led by Irwin Cotler who served as Canada's Attorney General under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Mr. Cotler's passion for human rights ignited a similar flame in Mr. Neuer.

 

"I very much wanted to follow in his path and be a defender of human rights and [to] advocate for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and to defend their rights", he said in a recent interview. That is precisely what he does, has been doing for two decades, revealing the hypocrisy within the international body that has become his focus in life. Where the world's most obvious and criminal regimes have sway and head UN positions on human rights; the most serious violators of human rights sitting in judgement on nations with impeccable human rights records.

 

Mr. Neuer's critiques over continual, unending sanctions against one tiny country among the 193 nations of the world highlight the absurdity of a world body dedicated to justice, human rights and peace directing its ire against a nation that is as close to upholding those values as any other upstanding member of the United Nations, highlighting the power of blocs like the unaligned nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Two of the world's most blatant human rights abusers, Russia and China, sit on the five-nation Security Council. 

In February on the 20th anniversary of Hillel Neuer's leadership of UN Watch one speech, "Where are  your Jews?" in a challenge to Arab UN delegations to address the evacuation of ancestral Jewish communities from their ancient homelands within the Arab nations of the Middle East was seminal, right-to-the-point, and went unanswered. 

 

 

Weeks following the Hamas invasion of Israel a report documenting close to two dozen UNRWA staffers celebrating the atrocities on social media was released by UN Watch. In January an analysis of a group on the Telegram social media site that features thousands of UNRWA educators in Gaza, found widespread support for terrorism. "May Allah grant them victory" wrote  Shatha Husam Al Nawajha responding to a teaching colleague's comment that Hamas operatives were "breastfed Jihad with their mothers' milk".

Following the 1948 Arab-Israel war when joint Arab-nation militaries attacked the nascent Jewish state and were defeated, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created to look after the needs of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled the contested area. At the very same time, with the creation of the State of Israel, Arabized Jews who had lived for millennia in the Middle East and North Africa were expelled, their belongings transferred to state ownership.

While the exiled Jews found refuge in Israel or in a wider diaspora, the Palestinians were placed in refugee camps in Arab countries that refused them citizenship, leaving them to live in squalor. They were meant to represent a living, breathing sore on the body politic in the claim that Israel was responsible for their plight; a people who had been promised by those Arab states that they could return once Israel was annihilated, neither of which aspiration met with reality.

Ever since, in the 70 years that followed, the world has regarded the Palestinians, through the auspices of the United Nations, as refugees, a status of permanency never before encountered with the many huge pools of refugees caused by civil wars, nation-to-nation conflict, natural disasters or any other globally unsettling cause. The leaders infuse them with rage over the creation of a Jewish state in an ancestral Judaic geography, inciting Palestinians to 'resist' the 'oppression' of a Jewish presence with unadulterated lethal violence.

UNRWA, conceived with the purpose of maintaining Palestinian 'refugees', nurtured their belief that they would some day return. In fact, many never left, and today, totalling over two million, they are citizens of the State of Israel; those who fled or were forced out in 1948 whose issue -- children and grandchildren are now counted among the 'refugees' will never return -- now total 7 million; an absurdity in and of itself.

UN Watch's findings, following the news that ten percent of UNRWA's workforce is tied to Palestinian terrorist groups were presented in January in testimony before the U.S. Congress by Mr. Neuer. Prior to that an Israeli intelligence dossier revealed that 13 UNRWA members comprised of seven primary and secondary school teachers along with math and Arabic instructors, had taken part personally in the October 7 massacres in Israel.

Revelations that electrified major donors of the UNRWA program, including its largest donor, the United States. Among others, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom saw fit to suspend their funding of the UN agency. Mr. Neuer predicts that funding will be reinstated by UNRWA donors even with promised reforms neglected. UNRWA, given its disastrous performance, he feels, will be dismantled, its mandate replaced by other bodies of the UN.

Enough is enough. UNRWA must be dissolved and replaced. UN Watch

The Palestinian Narrative in Canada

"Targeting Mount Sinai Hospital to incite intifada against Israel and the Jewish people is flagrantly antisemitic and undermines the health and safety of the patients and medical professionals who work there."

Member of Parliament Macro Mendicino

"[The] demonstrators were actually protesting [the] indiscriminate killing of any and all innocent men, women and children."

"Anyone who condemns one but not the other is demonstrating to all of us how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism operate to devalue the lives of those deemed less than human and unworthy of protections, including those afforded by international humanitarian law."

"Many have joined the hundreds of peaceful protests that have taken place across the country. And many report being silenced and/or having faced repercussions for standing up in solidarity with the Palestinian people."

Amira Elghawaby, Canada's Trudeau-appointed Islamophobia representative

 

"The demonstration at Mount Sinai Hospital yesterday was reprehensible. Hospitals are places for treatment and care, not protests and intimidation."

"I strongly condemn this display of antisemitism."

"In Toronto and across Canada, we stand with Jewish communities against this hate."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

A screenshot from video posted to X of protesters outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto on Monday, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo by @DrJacobsRad /X

On Monday, Canadians and Torontonians in particular were treated to yet another now-predictable spectacle of pointed Jew-hate in a triumph of pro-Palestinian public relations when hundreds of committed Hamas admirer/supporters were out marching for the Palestinian 'cause' of a final, decisive intifada that would excise the State of Israel from the Middle East geography and lavish love on the Palestinians by affirming its state from the '(Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea'.

Following the demonstration, social media posts showed a Spiderman-clad protester scaling the hospital to mount a Palestinian flag over Mount Sinai's identifying logo, a stylized Star of David. This was a hospital established in 1923 to allow for a medical system that would treat Jews, responding to the practices of antisemitism of the day restricting university admittance to Jews in medical faculties and from practising in the hospitals of the day. 

 

The protest, organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement Toronto and toronto4palestine, drew their route with its final destination, the Israeli Consulate in Toronto, through University Avenue's "Hospital Row", where five hospitals are situated. Mount Sinai, the sole institution with the Star of David logo, established to serve a growing 1900s Jewish population facing discrimination at other facilities and where Jewish doctors, barred from other hospitals could find employment. Now a public hospital, it serves the medical needs of all.

 

These are people marching for justice for Palestinians, and who deny justice for Jews. Justice for Palestinians equates with disrupting Israel in every conceivable manner, claiming it an apartheid state where puzzlingly to that claim two million Palestinians living as Israelis enjoy citizenship in the country, with opportunities to sit in the Knesset as full parliamentarians, to sit as justices on Israeli courts, and teach in Israeli universities. But to march in protest against Israel in Canada it is mandatory to deny the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

"They are using these made-up acts of cruelty and barbarism to tell the world a mini Holocaust just happened to them again."

"Is it possible that if they are lying about these events and creating a false genocide, it is likely they may have lied about certain details of a previous big genocide that may have occurred?"

toronto4palestine social media post

Emergency physician Raghu Venugopal along with a colleague, witnessed the protest and recorded a video in front of the hospital "to witness and to counter-protest any kind of protest in front of a hospital". Introduced in the House of Commons in 2021, Bill C-3 outlines protections for health care workers under Canada's Criminal Code, making it illegal to intimidate health care workers or whose assisting them from performing their duties, or attempting to prevent someone from obtaining and accessing health services. Ironically, that Bill arose from problems related to COVID, the pandemic that conspiracy theorists indulging in race hate attributed to Jews.

Canada's special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism announced her office's intention to call "Toronto's Mayor and Chief of Police today to discuss how they will put a stop to this despicable targeting and attempted intimidation of Mount Sinai Hospital and Jews across Toronto and Canada". While she's at it, she might consider contacting the Liberal-led government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to talk about his appointed Islamophobia expert whom he touted as helping to fight "hatred in all its forms" to build "a country where everyone feels safe and respected".

"Palestinian Spider-Man," or spiderman4palestine on social media, has become a "fixture" at pro-Palestinian protests in Toronto for climbing up various structures. On Monday, he was widely condemned for climbing up historically Jewish hospital Mount Sinai. Social media

 

Authoritarian Tyrannies: Russia ... Canada?

"People who exterminated Jews, Russians and Poles are alive. And the president, the current president of today's Ukraine applauds him in the Canadian Parliament, gives a standing ovation."

"Can we say that we have completely uprooted this ideology if what we see is happening today?"

"The Canadian Parliament introduced a man who, as the Speaker of the Parliament said, fought against the Russians during the World War II. Well, who fought against the Russians during World War II? Hitler and his accomplices."

"The president of Ukraine stood  up with the entire Parliament of Canada and applauded this man. How can this be imagined?"

"The president of Ukraine himself, by the way, is a Jew by nationality."

Russian President Vladimir Putin

"It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, 'What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much'?"

"'Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him'?"

News host Tucker Carlson

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Feb. 6. The interview aired in Russia early on Friday morning. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters)

 

Well, actually, no, Mr. Putin. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian by nationality.  He is, by virtue of his ethnic origins, a Jew. For someone who is quite particular about facts and figures to support a thesis of Russian entitlement and ownership to a geography claimed by its national inhabitants as sovereign, your grasp of origins and heritage leaves much to be desired. But then, conflating Nazism and Jewry seems to fit well in your puzzle of a Greater Russia. 

The Stalin who presided firmly over an eastern Europe that was forced to surrender autonomy and sovereignty to the concept 'all for one and one for itself' under the hammer and sickle also thought so highly of Jews many of whom engineered the social and political structure of Communism that he sought to butcher them all. And you yourself in emulation, focus not merely on individuals of a whole, but a whole nation of those individuals, aligning yourself with the vector of that nation's extermination.

From reality, fiction embellishes the truth and you are a past master at embellishing fiction to resemble the reality. Every nation has its diehard fascists, and although it's difficult to discern where socialism leaves off and fascism takes up, they both target Jews through everlasting hatred and contempt. Designing a campaign of occupation under the rubric of 'saving Ukraine from neo-nazism' suited the special military operation' otherwise known as a land-grab.

The man hungering for greater notoriety and admiration as an icon of interviewing prowess catered to your bruised ego most professionally, Mr. Putin, as you silenced  his queries and launched your professorial lesson in aggrieved heritage and history with its outlines of reality enhanced by deceptive claims of authenticity. What more could be asked for than having an American whose reputation also has been bruised to unctuously play to your paranoia?

According to Dmitry Peskov the interview with Carlson was agreed to, since "he has a position which differs" from other Western media. Where, according to Tucker Carlson, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a mere "border dispute" the outcome of which fully revealed America's hatred for Russia. The Jewish-Ukrainian Zelenskyy characterized as a "dictator, a dangerous authoritarian". The Russian dangerously authoritarian dictator fully approved.

But then an embarrassing and completely avoidable incident useful as an example of the perfidy of the West and the revelation of Zelenskyy's true political nature was revealed to Mr. Putin's satisfaction in the Ukrainian President's being confronted in the Canadian House of Commons with the presence of a venerable old Ukrainian-Canadian -- in fact a veteran of the SS Galicia Division of the Waffen SS -- as a WWII hero. 

The Parliamentary Speaker of the House resigned in disgrace following the revelation of 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka's wartime exploits with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, involved in massacres and war crimes, including the deaths of European Jews, Roma and Poles. "This was a mistake that has deeply embarrassed Parliament and Canada. All of us who were in this House ... regret deeply having stood and clapped even though we did so unaware of the context. It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust", confessed Justin Trudeau.

Who seems fond of speaking of the Holocaust as a world-shaking event exemplifying man's inhumanity to man, decrying the institutionalized, planned and executed murder of millions, yet somehow overlooking that the Holocaust is specific to the Jewish experience. As when Canada finally erected a Holocaust memorial, where the official plaque somehow was etched to read regret over the deaths of millions of children, women and men, yet never did the word 'Jew' appear.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tours the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Wednesday, September 27, 2017. The monument's dedication plaque didn't mention the six million Jews killed during the Second World War genocide. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

The House speaker resigned in responsible disgrace. "This only confirms our thesis that one of our goals in Ukraine is denazifiction", Putin said. Justin Trudeau apologized, while his government claimed Anthony Rota, the Speaker, was solely to blame. Only much later was it revealed to the public that the same former volunteer for the SS Galicia Division, Mr. Hunka, had been invited by the Office of the Prime Minister to a Toronto reception for Mr. Zelenskyy.

"He [ Putin] will, of course,  use whatever propaganda he can engage in. But I can tell you Canadians will not be fooled. So we will continue to be there with Ukraine for as much as it takes for as long as it takes."

"Unfortunately, we see the lengths to which Russian propaganda will go to try and impact public opinion to try and twist things the way [they] want to."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Mr. Trudeau would know all about propaganda and spreading false information. He is himself quite expert at it. And Canadians have been fooled. Much that has been promised to Ukraine has been well publicized, yet never actually delivered. As for propagada and influencing and impacting public opinion, there is never any end of it to suit Mr. Trudeau's agenda in Canada; dividing Canadians, justifying abandoning the nation's natural resources, creating massive upheavals in Canadian heritage and culture through inappropriate mass immigration of people whose culture and values are inimical to Canada's; and forcing an agenda of Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, along with Transgender issues.

For Canadian Jews, this is a time of huge destabilization, when the spectre of past antisemitic assaults on the Jewish community has flared into life with a passion of hate manifested through labour unions, academic institutions, and on the streets of cities across the nation with hordes of 'pro-Palestinian' protesters marching in condemnation of Israel for responding to an obscenely sadistic slaughter of Israelis by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7. Where calls to exterminate Israel are chanted and Jews are taunted and confronted, with no anti-hate laws enforced by authorities.

A man stops to take a photo of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument following its official opening ceremony in Ottawa, Wednesday September 27, 2017. (The Canadian Press)

Destroying Hamas, the Ultimate Goal

"It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah."

"On the contrary, it is clear that intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians evacuate the areas of combat."

Office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Palestinians inspect a car hit by an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 10, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

The Israeli military was ordered on Friday to prepare a twofold plan of immediate action. The first, to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah, the densely populated southern city in Gaza. Once that process has seen completion a ground invasion by the Israel Defense Forces is expected to take place. The order, given by the Prime Minister of Israel arrived despite international criticism, particularly from the highest levels of the U.S. government who foresee military action by Israel in Rafah as a disaster-in-waiting.

 

The decision was made, however and is meant to proceed expeditiously after four months of intense fighting between the IDF and the terrorist group Hamas, alongside other Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Ground forces are prepared to move into the city bordering Egypt. The prewar population of Rafah was about 280,000. The United Nations states that Rafah now shelters about 1.4 million people living with relatives, in shelters or sprawling tent camps, having fled the fighting taking place in other areas of Gaza.

 

It is a moot point whether it is Israel's responsibility in a time of violent conflict to protect a civilian population thrown into the path of retribution and removal of an existential threat to the population of Israel, or that of the terrorist group which governs the Gaza Strip and which receives majority support from that civilian population. Which by the expedient of surrendering to a military tasked to prevent it from any further assaults within Israel, could spare Palestinians from war's ongoing dangers.

 

Hamas leaders  have made it abundantly clear, speaking in very public fora that nothing will deter them from mounting one deadly attack after another on Israel. The October 7 assault that struck southern Israel in a sudden influx of violent marauders -- who set out to slaughter Jews, to mass-rape Israeli women, to murder their elders and their children, to take hundreds of civilian hostages in a show of savagely barbaric force with its horrific component of sadistic pleasure -- initiated the current war.

 

Displaced Palestinians, who fled their houses due to Israeli strikes, take shelter in a tent camp, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at the border with Egypt, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 8, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

It was never difficult to find ample evidence of the entertainment and pleasure taken by the terrorists since body cams were expressly used for the purpose of 'public relations' by a people lacking a moral code, to express their celebratory joy with the success of their mission in executing helpless people, setting fire to their homes consigning entire families to a horrible death, mounting an attack on a holiday music festival with thousands of Israeli youth in attendance to slaughter hundreds and take others hostage.

Actions have consequences, and actions of depraved maleficence in particular have consequences of wholesale dread consequences for those on the receiving end of punishment for unconscionable villainy. Rafah is now considered by the Israeli military and its government to represent the final stronghold for Hamas in Gaza, following four months of relentless conflict.

 

Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered his military and security officials to arrive at a 'combined plan' to include both a mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of Hamas forces. The people of Gaza, the Palestinians who 'voted' overwhelmingly for the terrorist group to lead them are now victims of war. Their plight has moved the international community in a way that the victims of the Hamas slaughter of 1,200 Jewish lives failed to, and the pressure applied to the Israeli government's offensive is enormous.

 

The United Nations claims that millions have been displaced in Gaza, resulting in a humanitarian crisis of food shortages along with a lack of medical services.  This is the same United Nations whose arm of support for Palestinian 'refugees' -- UNRWA -- has been accused of complicity with Hamas. A charge with ample evidence to support it. Not only have hospitals and schools in Gaza been co-opted by Hamas for weapons storage and command posts, but UNRWA's Gaza headquarters has been revealed to house a sophisticated underground executive command headquarters for Hamas.

While pressure has been placed by the United Nations and Israel's Western allies to ensure humanitarian aid enters Gaza, Hamas operatives have taken possession of that humanitarian aid rather than see it distributed among the population. Looted aid is now available -- for sale to Palestinians in markets supplying ample food to those who will pay inflated prices -- the proceeds benefiting Hamas. This is the Hamas that uses its people as security shields, endangering them by operating and securing themselves in dense residential areas.

Israeli air strikes have begun. Egypt warns Palestinians it will not accept their entry, even while it warns Israel that complete destabilization will challenge its peace treaty with Israel. Friction, always tense between the U.S. officials who are negotiating between Qatar, Egypt, Hamas and Israel, is at its height. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attempting to mediate a ceasefire has once again failed to secure his goal.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he intends to settle for nothing outside of "total victory" in destroying the Hamas military machinery and governing capabilities. The issue of Israeli hostages remaining in Hamas captivity is one of burning rage among Israelis in the knowledge of the hostages' plight of ongoing torment and abuse.

Smoke billows during Israeli bombardment of Khan Yunis, not far from Rafah  SAID KHATIB / AFP

"If You Harm An American, We Will Respond"

"Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing."

"Let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American we will respond."

"[Any American response would not be limited to one hit, but a] tiered response [over time]."

U.S. President Joe Biden 

"We know that there are militants that use these locations, IRGC as well as Iranian-aligned militia group personnel."

"We made these strikes tonight with an idea that there would likely be casualties associated with people inside those facilities."

Lt.-General Douglas Sims, director, Joint Staff

US President Joe Biden, right, stands as an Army carry team moves the transfer case containing the remains of US Army Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware on February 2. Sanders was killed in a drone attack in Jordan on January 28.

Matt Rourke/AP

 

According to U.S. Central Command the assault made use of over 125 precision munitions. The U.S. planned the strikes, scanning the weather, in order to allow the United States to confirm that its forces hit the right targets while planning to avoid civilian casualties. This was the result of the American military launching an air assault on dozens of sites in both Iraq and Syria.

These are sites known to be used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Friday's assault represented the opening salvo of retaliation for the drone strike last week that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan, wounding scores of others. 

Over 85 targets located at several areas including command and control headquarters, intelligence centres, involved a massive barrage of rockets and missiles, drones to strike at ammunition storage sites along with other facilities connected to the militias or the IRGC's Quds Force. In his announcement to the public President Biden made it clear there would be more to follow.

In the interests of preventing conflict from escalating further, the U.S. strikes appeared to stop just short of targeting Iran directly, or senior leaders of the Revolutionary Guard Quds Force within its borders. What the impact of the strikes will be is unclear. The U.S.  telegraphed warning of the imminence of a response and it was assumed militia members had scattered. Given that multiple groups operate at a number of locations in several countries the assault is not expected to have delivered a wholesale blow.

Kataib Hezbollah, one of the major Iranian-backed militias, had stated its intention to suspend attacks on American troops, while other militias stated their intention to continue fighting in interests of demonstrating themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause in a conflict in Gaza that Hamas atrocities in Israel incited the Israel Defense Forces to invade the Strip with the intention of destroying its ruling Hamas terror group.

According to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, the targets to be hit "were carefully selected to avoid civilian casualties, and based on clear, irrefutable evidence that they were connected to attacks on American personnel in the region". The strikes took 30 minutes from start to completion. Three sites struck were located in Iraq, and four were in Syria, noted Lt.-Gen.Douglas Sims. 

Syria state media reported casualties without issuing details. In the Syria strikes, reported the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 18 terrorists died. Yahya Rasool, Iraqi army spokesperson, said the city of al-Qaim and areas along the border with Syria were hit by the airstrikes which "constitute a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and undermine the efforts of the Iraqi government, posing a threat that will pull Iraq and the region to undesirable consequences."

As for Iran's President Ebrahim Aaisi, earlier promises by Tehran to retaliate for any American strikes targeting its interests were repeated: We "will not start a war, but if a country, if a cruel force wants to bully us, the Islamic Republic of Iran will give a strong response".

Residents gather around destroyed buildings after US warplanes carried out an airstrike on the headquarters of Hashd al-Shaabi in Al-Qaim city of Anbar, Iraq on February 3.

Hashd al-Shaabi Media Office/Handout/Anadolu/Getty Images

On The Wrong Side Of Woke

"In a social media post he admits may have been a little too blistering, he said that an academic in Pakistan calling for Palestine to be free 'from the river to the sea' was a 'pro-Nazi zealot'."

"Finlayson said he stands with Israel, against antisemitism and against Hamas, which he said takes millions meant for  health and education and uses the money to make war. "You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler".

John Ivison, Journalist, National Post

"[He is ] stressed and uncertain about his future ... stuck in procedural purgatory."

"The suspension has caused my client significant reputational and financial harm, as well as immense personal distress."

"[The university claims the suspension is 'non-disciplinary']. It is clearly anything but."

"[The university appears to have concluded Paul Finlayson engaged in misconduct even before holding an investigation], in flagrant violation of its own policies, its own collective agreement and my client's right to procedural fairness."

Kathryn Marshall, Levitt Sheikh Law

University of Guelph-Humber marketing instructor Paul Finlayson has been suspended pending an investigation into a social media post supporting Israel and denouncing Hamas

 

Lawyer Marshall wrote to Guelph-Humber University's manager of human rights, harassment and employment equity in January on behalf of her client in an attempt to resolve a situation that has left the 59-year-old university lecturer suspended with pay from his teaching employment at the university. Her client, she reminded him, awaits information respecting the complaint lodged against him but no one had yet contacted him. She, like her client before her, received no response.

Her letter emphasized that there is no reason that adjunct Professor Finlayson should be suspended while an investigation was ongoing. The conduct for which he gained the suspension took place outside the university, and her client poses no threat to anyone. His sin was his outraged response to another academic living in Pakistan who had expressed  his support for Hamas and Palestinians, which Professor Finlayson strenuously disagreed with, pointing out that Hamas terrorists set out to rape and murder innocent civilians.

He has been left in limbo; several complaints had been made to the university for his having had expressed his empathy with Israel's plight brought on by the Palestinian terrorist group that ruled Gaza. Whose operatives had created a hell on Earth for a civilian population living in towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza border, and who in fact had sympathized with Gaza's Palestinian population, going out of their way to be of assistance to them, and hiring many as farm labourers. Hires many of whom had briefed Hamas on locales and area situations.

His expressions however, earned  him a suspension and it has been two months that he has been awaiting results of an 'investigation'. In the absence of any move to inform him of a decision that might return him to his lecturing position at the university, despite his course lectures for the semester having been cancelled by the university. His lawyers have advised him to appeal to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. 

Several students appear to have taken umbrage over his outburst at the Pakistani academic's sentiments. And there was also a Canadian academic who had complained. That academic has been identified as Dr. Wael Ramadan, professor of project management at the Pilon School of Business at Sheridan College. Professor Ramadan's own sentiments are in stark opposition to those of Professor Finlayson, unsurprisingly. He has written of Israel as "an apartheid state committing genocide".

Professor Ramadan has a Twitter account with a small number of followers. He posts savagely slanderous and obviously false allegations about the activities of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces in the Palestinian Territories and more specifically in Gaza where according to his world view Israel has been busy committing genocide. Sheridan College has taken no steps whatever to relieve Professor Ramadan of his professional academic presence nor to penalize him in any way for his egregious statements.

But Professor Ramadan feels himself justified in inciting hatred and violence against Israel and Jews, and feels he is entitled to do so without repercussions. He also appears to be of the opinion that Professor Finlayson's fairly tame expressions have earned him censure and uncertainty of his future that could very well result in the loss of his employment at Guelph-Humber University. 

 

Such are the vagaries of cringing academic institutions under pressure by conveyors of Critical Race Theory, Wokeism and the virtues of DEI theology. 

Fuelling Hamas By Funding UNRWA

"A fourth grade math exercise asks students to calculate the number of martyrs [including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centres] in Palestinian uprisings and it [is] accompanied by a photograph of raised coffins at a mass funeral."

2021 IMPACT-se report

"There is no question in anyone’s mind that, given that the majority of UNRWA’s funding goes to education, given that the education is geared towards inciting whole generations of Palestinians to commit the kind of unspeakable acts of terror that we saw, there needs to be a direct link between international funding of UNRWA and an absolute, iron-flat, not just guarantee, but evidence, that once and for all, UNRWA stops teaching this curriculum."

"We need that to end, and it needs to end right now. The international community has the power to end it because they are financially supporting it. That is the absolute bottom [line]. There cannot be one single day more of hate teaching."

"We warned that there will be a terrible outcome and that is what you saw. Hamas made its intentions crystal-clear in Arabic. We read it in the textbooks, but the damage is done. It’s unspeakable damage."

"[UNRWA claims it must teach the curriculum of ] the host nation."

“Time and time again, they have been told by the international community that change is necessary, and time and time again, instead of rewriting the curriculum to take out the hate they simply said, ‘We cannot because it is the host nation’s curriculum.’ That’s not good enough. They hid behind bureaucratic gobbledygook instead of taking the duty of care as educators.”

IMPACT-SE CEO Marcus Sheff

 

UNRWA has been heavily criticized frequently by  charges that it has links to Palestinian terrorists, more particularly the governing Gaza terrorist group, Hamas. It would have been difficult to deny those links since many of those UNRWA hires to implement their programs are in fact members of Hamas. In 2010, because of those proven links Canada's previous Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cut Canada's funding to the UN group in 2010.          

 

When Justin Trudeau, the current prime minister of a Liberal government took office, he restored UNRWA funding. Funding that has now been announced by Canada's International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen, to be but a temporary suspension. Reality is, however, that the Liberal government's pious statement of having suspended funding to UNRWA now unequivocally stained with evidence that some of its employees took part in the October 7 pogrom in Israel, is an equivocation too far; the funds were provided prior to the declaration of suspension.

 

Prior to that, it was a known fact that UNRWA facilities had been used to stockpile Hamas rockets, and that launch sites were close to UNRWA facilities. When rockets are launched responses by the targets tend to aim back at the site from which they were launched, creating for Hamas the opportunities it seeks, to cast Israel in the devil's mould for 'targeting' crowded civilian populations. To which UNRWA was an enabler. When Trudeau restored UNRWA funding from Canada, he sneered at the previous government's cutting off the agency, for "political reasons".

 

"Quite frankly", he stated, in his inimical patronizing manner "Canadians expect us to be helpful in the world"; perhaps but not to terrorists. An estimated $110 million was sent from Canada to the UN agency. To an agency which, in Bearing Witness -- the 43-minute video detailing footage in real time of the October 7 atrocities being enacted and the shocking pleasure of Hamas operatives while murdering Israeli children, women and the elderly and desecrating their corpses -- amply demonstrates why not.

 

Images from the January, 2021 IMPACT-se report on UNRWA Palestinian school textbooks. (Screenshot)

 

The Israeli non-profit IMPACT-se conducts analyses on a regular basis of textbooks from UNRWA schools, since the agency's primary role is schooling provision to Palestinians. In them overt antisemitic conspiracy theories and violent Jihad are featured, with Israel referred to as the "Zionist Occupation". And there geography publications feature maps where the State of Israel is absent and reading lessons come complete with "martyr", "attack" and "intifada".

A report in spring of 2023 by the German magazine BILD uncovered examples of  textbooks and course materials with anti-Jewish propaganda. One Grade 9 exercise described an arson attack on an Israeli bus as a "barbecue". The headline of the article in BILD read: "Germany continues to pay for hatred of Jews". When UNRWA officials were charged directly by Avi Benlolo of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, their response to him was: "they admitted this was an ongoing problem but suggested nothing could be done about it".

There have been occasions when UNRWA admitted its facilities were used to house munitions and even rocket launch sites for Hamas and other terrorist groups. The agency wrote that it had "discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip" in July of 2014, A following press release noted that a second discovery had been made and then a third. The munitions in all three instances were "referred to the local authorities"; in other words Hamas removed them for storage elsewhere.

In January, UN Watch issued a report detailing dozens of social media posts where UNRWA employees openly celebrated the October 7 massacres; in some instances even while the attacks were ongoing. A Telegram channel used by 3,000 UNRWA teachers and administrators yielded celebratory posts on the very morning of the attacks. Israa Abdul Kareem Mezher teaching at a UNRWA-funded elementary school asked fellow teachers to pray for Hamas fighters and the destruction of Israel.

A 2015 UN Watch report detailing social media posts by UNRWA teachers glorifying terrorism or antisemitic conspiracies resulted in several UNRWA employees being fired. One post shared publicly to Facebook read "Stab Zionist dogs". The agency's commissioner Pierre Krahenbuhl in 2019 was responsible for a culture of nepotism and financial irregularities, leading him to resign. Just recently he began new employment as director general of the International Red Cross.