Calling someone an old soul says they’re wise before their time.
It has nothing to do with age. A child can be an old soul. But if there’s One Big Thing that happened this year, it’s how the idea of being ‘old’ is changing and how quickly we should move to catch up to it.
Read on…
You know how those models look back at you from the pages of luxe publications: pouty, pale, thin and rich? Not a good look these days.
I’ve always wondered why, among all the categories of ‘stuff’ for sale in the world that luxury goods is the only one where the people enjoying the products are not enjoying the products. Everywhere else, from beer to travel, cars to lottery tickets, the connection between smiling people promising you’ll be smiling too, is swift and sure.
You’d think a $10,000 watch, a Louis Vuitton suitcase or a Dior suit would make you happy. Or happier, at least. But no.
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For less than $100 you can save someone — a family member, a university student, a wayward stranger — from becoming an antisemite.
That is, someone who’s hostile or prejudiced against Jews because they’re Jews, in the way that racists are hostile to Black people. No reason, really. They’re Black, is all.
This is actually a big public health issue. Antisemites spread a disease that is more infectious and deadly than COVID ever was. While COVID has killed 7 million people, antisemitism killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, plus millions more from antisemitism’s earliest days in the 5th century.
When I speak of antisemites, I don’t mean someone who doesn’t like particular policies of the Israeli government or its leaders (I think Bibi Netanyahu is a dreadful Prime Minister), or someone who doesn’t like a particular Jew because, for example, she’s a jerk and drinks too much.
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I went to an event in Toronto on Wednesday to hear five Muslim speakers talk about the war between Israel and Hamas. The room was jammed with 650 eager listeners.
The keynote speaker was Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of the co-founder of Hamas.
Then three panelists each spoke, chaired by Raheel Raza, President of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow. The panelists were Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari, the first Iranian-Canadian woman elected to office in Canada and the Chair of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy; Asaad Sam Hanna, a member of the US Armed Forces and a strategic advisor to the Lobo Institute; and Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.
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I know some couples who are household names in business and public service. They check all the boxes: virtuous without being virtue-signallers, hard-working without being owned by it, all while being powerful and household words.
Three of these couples in particular have kids who are in trouble: with substance abuse; mental disorders; or what I’ll call ‘chronic purposelessness.’
The parents are frantic, searching for the treatment or cure that will restore calm in their family and security in their kids.
One of them perches very high in a giant company. He oversees the people who oversee the people who run the company’s group benefits program. That is to say, the insurance company that manages many thousands of medical claims each year, including a rising number of mental health claims.
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Just as Hamas hides within the general population of Gaza, so do Canada’s antisemites walk among us. And since October 7th both these groups have come out from under cover to show their lethal true colours.
I’m not talking about protesters here. Plenty of people of every belief think Israel is practising a form of apartheid against Palestinians, and that its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants no Arabs, none, in Israel where 1.5 million live now.
Nor am I talking about “soft” antisemites who may still say quietly to a friend: “I got Jewed out of that deal.”
No, I’m talking about people who don’t just dislike Jews, but who hate them. In fact, they want Jews wiped from the face of the earth simply because they’re Jews.
This venomous hatred is both ancient and volcanic. It is also changing fast.
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It’s easy to do, especially in Canada where our military is starved into invisibility and seems to have missed the gender revolution completely.
Sure, we may remember those who fought and died for us on the 11th hour of this 11th day of this 11th month, but that memory will fade almost instantly for most of us. Even though two dangerous wars are now burning uncontrollably.
We shouldn’t forget so quickly or easily. Because millions of us have some direct family connection to our armed forces and hence, to war. My father fought in the Second World War, and my brother, in Korea. Yet I never think of myself as coming from a military family.
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Two scandals this week show how the business of shame is always evolving.
The first involves Buffy Sainte-Marie who seemed as Indigenous as can be.
But the CBC’s Fifth Estate shocked us all by uncovering documentation and witnesses that claim she was not born into the Cree First Nation north of Regina, but is an Italian-American raised in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
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Do you think Jews should pay twice what non-Jews pay to attend the University of Toronto? Or Blacks twice as much as whites to go to Western? Or women, twice as much as men to go to Queen’s? Non bien sûr que non!
But this month, Quebec announced it would double university tuition for students from outside the province. Double it at the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec, or Université Laval? Non. Fees are only doubling at English-speaking universities like McGill and Concordia.
Said Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education Pascale Déry: “Quebeckers will no longer pay for the training of English-speaking Canadian students, most of whom return to their province after graduation.”
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I got my first ‘holiday’ appeal for a donation this week. By the week before Jesus’ Birthday, our inboxes will be groaning with these appeals.
But I’ve always been puzzled by what cause doesn’t get support and has to practically beg to keep their doors open every year. Indeed, some shut their doors for lack of funds, never to open them again.
I’m speaking about women’s shelters, those temporary homes that women who are being abused flee to, often with their kids, to get away from their abusers on the long hard road to leading a ‘normal’ life again.
The lack of support for women’s shelters is puzzling for two reasons:
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On October 7, George Achi, the CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards and Practices and Public Trust, e-mailed all CBC journalists, urging them not to refer to Hamas as ‘terrorists’.
“Do not refer to militants, soldiers or anyone else as ‘terrorists.’ The notion of terrorism is heavily politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as terrorists, we should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact. This includes statements from the Canadian government and Canadian politicians.”
Actually, calling someone a terrorist who blows people up, kidnaps civilians and threatens to behead them, and cuts babies’ throats out, is not opinion, it’s fact. We may quarrel whether one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. But to avoid the use of “terrorist” to describe Hamas, let alone to practically forbid it, perverts the English language in a way that would make George Orwell gag.
The CBC’s argument is that because terrorism is part of the story, the word “terrorist” is somehow off-limits. Really? How incredibly condescending our national broadcaster is to think that people can’t read or hear the word “terrorism” and not feel compromised, or worse, offended. I say if someone can endure the actual terror of being kidnapped, murdered, and much much worse, we can endure hearing about it.
And not some pablum-ed version of it, where a “terrorist” is now just a “participant,” but an actual person “who uses violent action in order to achieve political aims or to force a government to act.”
Long before their invasion of Israel, Hamas has been condemned as a terrorist organization by dozens of countries, including Canada.
So their commitment to terror is not a matter of debate or discussion. It’s a matter of legal fact.
Get a grip, CBC.
Meanwhile…
In Quebec, where the Magpie River in 2021 was recognized as a legal person with nine legal rights, including the right to flow, to maintain its biodiversity and to take legal action. It’s all part of the environmental personhood movement which began in the 1970s as a tactic to pressure governments to protect the environment: indeed, the Magpie River could now sue the government. Lest you think this is either legal over-reach or Woke gone wild, recall that women in Canada weren’t declared ‘persons’ until 1929.
Today, species, genders and what were once thought to be wildly different kinds of living things are spilling over onto each other, insisting that they have voices and that their voices be heard.
So if plants have rights, surely artificial intelligence will soon demand its own as well.
Meanwhile….
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