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Brownstone Institute

Make no mistake, the Israel-Hamas conflict is Canada’s fight too

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11 minute read

By Joe Adam George

The threats posed by the ‘new axis of evil’ comprising Russia, China and Iran have now mushroomed into two major conflicts

On October 7, Canadians woke up to images of grisly war crimes committed by Hamas, a listed terrorist entity in Canada, halfway across the world in Israel. Following their deadly and barbaric incursion into the Jewish nation from across the Gaza border, an estimated 1,000 Hamas terrorists methodically mutilated, raped, burned and murdered at least 1,300 Israelis in horrific ways not witnessed since the Holocaust. Still reeling from the surprise attack, Israel formally declared war on Hamas the next day, vowing to ‘wipe them off the face of the Earth’.

With the conflict now into its third week, the events unravelling in the Middle East and, indeed, across the globe, since the deadly morning of October 7 spell grim news for Canada. Still facing global ridicule and isolation after a crisis-laden September during which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau managed to get into a diplomatic spat with India and, inexplicably, honoured a former Nazi unit soldier in the Parliament in the presence of visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Israel-Hamas conflict is a headache he could have done without; especially given the complex nature of Jewish and Muslim vote bank politics at home.

As Canada turned inwards amidst culture wars and socio-economic crises in recent years, the threats posed by the ‘new axis of evil’ comprising Russia, China and Iran have now mushroomed into two major conflicts involving our allies, Ukraine and Israel. A third conflict, involving Taiwan, may be on the horizon. These conflicts have once again proven that rogue state and non-state actors cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. Any delusions of grandeur or signs of weakness will only lead to more violence, inevitably targeting innocent civilians.

Regrettably, a large (and stubborn) segment of the Western foreign policy elite continues to believe funding or coddling our ideological foes will somehow make them allies and acquiescent to change. On the contrary, they only hold us in further contempt by using our funds and credulity against us and our national interests. Take Pakistan as an example. Despite showering the terrorist haven with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in international aid, it continued to commit multiple transgressions, including allegedly harboring America’s Enemy No.1 and the late Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden (who, of course, was shot dead in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound in 2011).

Fast forward to the Israel-Hamas conflict, it is clear the West hasn’t learned from its past follies. With reports confirming Iran’s role in Hamas’ attacks on Israel, one only needs to look at the deluded Iran nuclear deal and other appeasement policies of the Biden administration and fellow Western democracies to ascertain why Israel now finds itself in the fight of its life. It is also precisely why, this time around, the decades-long conflict feels different; not only because of the unspeakable violence Hamas unleashed on innocent Israelis but because of the Israelis’ resolve to wipe out the terror group. The West, including Canada, are culpable for having played down the existential threat posed the Hamas ‘death cult’ and even funding extremism through donations to controversial entities like the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine and the Near East (UNRWA). We’ve also been far too lax in our own back yards, failing to exercise proper oversight over domestic charities and allowing university campuses to become hotbeds of vicious anti-Western and antisemitic sentiment.

Needless to say, the chickens have finally come home to roost. With five Canadians confirmed killed and another three held hostage by Hamas, it is bewildering and despicable to see fellow Canadians, sympathetic to the pro-Palestine cause, openly celebrate the death and destruction caused by the Hamas attacks.

Never one to disappoint when it comes to diaspora politics, the first inclination of the Trudeau government, faced with a deep fear of confronting an angry Arab mob or jeopardizing the Muslim vote bank, has been to appease and take no action against unauthorized pro-Hamas rallies promoting antisemitism and glorifying terrorism, even going so far as to disrupt antisemitism conferences. But this is the wrong instinct. Enabling support for a proscribed terror group guilty of heinous war crimes cannot be allowed in a country where all members of society are considered equally subject to the rule of law. The inaction of the West is what emboldened Hamas in the first place. It must end now.

Laws banning such rallies, similar to the one imposed by France, and canceling visas of foreign nationals participating in them must be seriously contemplated here in Canada. Also, in the interest of national security, amendments to the Citizenship Act ought to be made to revoke citizenship of individuals linked to terrorist groups even if it would render them stateless, as is practiced by the UK.

With Canada-based individuals and groups allegedly laundering money on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) must be directed to conduct regular and independent forensic audits of these entities in partnership with the Five Eyes and other global law enforcement agencies.

The Trudeau government’s awful record of accountability and vetting when it comes to disbursing funds to vile anti-Semites is a key reason why the $10 million Canadian aid promised to Palestinian civilians must be frozen to prevent it ending up in Hamas’ hands.

Other time-critical countermeasures to support Israel and prevent this war from spilling over would be to list the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization and reimpose the UN sanctions to kneecap Iran’s capability to purchase and supply missiles to its regional terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

The West needs to understand that Israel is doing them a favour by eliminating Hamas. Fueled by the widespread (and deplorable) global support for their attacks, we can expect an emboldened Hamas, which recently called for a  global ‘Day of Jihad’, to encourage lone-wolf attacks like the ones that took place in Beijing and Paris. The complete and total destruction of Hamas isn’t just a matter of Israeli security; it’s a matter of global security.

Make no mistake. Just as Hamas took advantage of the distraction created by the political infighting in Israel, the West is highly susceptible to similar attacks given the domestic turbulence in many countries, including Canada. Moreover, as FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Americans, the success of the Hamas attacks is likely to inspire other terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS to call for similar attacks in Western democracies, as seen from this week’s attack in the Belgian capital of Brussels.

Yet, the Trudeau government remains sheltered from the ugly realities of the rest of the world, especially the Global South, and woefully unprepared to protect Canadians from the emerging threats, as seen from the recent blocking of the Conservative opposition’s Bill C-350 to list the IRGC as a terrorist entity in Canada.

While Canada remains a safe haven for terrorists and transnational criminal organizations, Canadian values, interests and national security continue to be severely undermined by vote bank politics, foreign interference, criminal impunity, poor intelligence sharing and defence budget cuts. With the Liberal government prone to sleepwalking into one political disaster after another, the Israel-Hamas conflict ought to serve as a much needed wake-up call for PM Trudeau to prioritize Canada’s foreign policy and national security interests over self-serving vote bank politics. It may already be too late for Canada to avoid Europe’s fate as a hotbed for jihadist terrorism.

If the Liberal government isn’t up for this fight, it’d be in Canadians’ best interests for them to step aside and allow more serious people to take charge.

Joe Adam George is a former foreign policy and national security research intern with the Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank, Hudson Institute, and a communications strategist. He lives in Ottawa

Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Author

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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Brownstone Institute

The Revolution of 2024: A Rare Victory for Anti-Establishment Fury

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.

People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?

More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns  Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.

The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.

Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.

Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.

The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.

Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.

What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.

As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.

There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.

After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.

The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.

The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.

Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.

It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.

The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?

For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.

In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.

The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.

No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.

Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.

In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.

And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.

The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.

Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.

It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?

The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.

Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.

That was nuts but it happened.

If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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