Canada and Ukraine deepened their relationship on Thursday by signing a series of strategic partnerships primarily focused on defence. This is a good development, as the deal is structured in a way that will strengthen Ottawa’s military prowess, but more details are sorely needed to properly assess the full return-on-investment.

The enhanced alliance was announced in Calgary by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is visiting Canada for three days. Their proposition was straightforward and commonsensical: both countries benefit by combining Canadian financing and manufacturing with Ukrainian technology and battlefield expertise.

Per the new deal, Ottawa and Kyiv will collaborate on the production of drones, counter-drone technologies and “uncrewed systems” (unmanned war robots). Such a partnership has the potential to rapidly modernize Canada’s arsenals, as four years of war have transformed Ukraine into a global leader in these domains, rivalled only by Russia.

Ukrainian drones and robots are now far more sophisticated and cost-efficient than their NATO-designed counterparts, and, furthermore, Ukrainian soldiers are uniquely experienced at deploying these assets. The advantage this confers cannot be overstated: recent war exercises have repeatedly ended with Ukrainian forces utterly dominating their NATO peers.

Western allies have been clamouring for Kyiv’s technological and strategic innovations, hoping that, through mimicry, they can turbocharge their own militaries. Over the summer, for example, the Ukrainians began exporting their drones to the United States and gave the United Kingdom access to data gathered from tens of thousands of drone flights, which will be used to train AI-enhanced systems that can resist electronic jamming.

If Carney’s deal secures similar — or more substantial — technology transfers, then it will be of immense value to Canada. Cheap and effective Ukrainian drones could revitalize a decrepit military burdened by broken and outdated equipment. They could be particularly useful for patrolling and defending our vast Arctic territories, whose sovereignty is increasingly under threat.

Yet, the news releases associated with Thursday’s deal are frustratingly vague and, if read carefully, suggest that Ukrainian technology may not be leveraged as intensely as some might assume.

In the short term, Ottawa will award $50 million in initial contracts to six Canadian suppliers, who will manufacture drones using domestic, British and Australian technology. The stated goal of this “first step” is to rapidly grow Canada’s drone arsenal — currently a paltry 2,000 units — by a factor of ten. While this endeavour is commendable and arguably overdue, it ultimately does not leverage Ukrainian innovation.

As far as Ukrainian collaboration goes, Carney’s announcements are unspecific and contain only one concrete commitment: a partnership between General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada and “Green Tech Harvest,” a Kyiv-based drone company.

The details and budget of this partnership have not been publicly disclosed, unfortunately. How much money is Ottawa investing here? What will bilateral collaboration look like? How exactly will Canadian experts learn from their Ukrainian colleagues? It’s anyone’s guess.

Green Tech Harvest itself is also rather mysterious. Its website omits any mention of defence manufacturing and exclusively focuses on “agri-tech innovations” and “eco-friendly farm management solutions.” Yet, by searching the corporation by name and identification number, one can verify that it has, over the past year, produced drones for Ukraine, the United States and the European Union (plus Canada now, of course).

Such a client list confirms that this is a serious company that is, in all likelihood, obfuscating its public profile to maximize operational security. Yet, in any case, this opaqueness, even if understandable, leaves Canadians further befuddled. How is the public supposed to assess the value of its much-promoted drone deal if so little is known about a key Ukrainian partner?

Defence contracts obviously require a certain degree of secrecy, but within a limit. Some more details would be helpful for an initiative that has been so well-publicized and which remains inescapably political.

That being said, even if, in the worst case scenario, Canada’s direct collaboration with Ukrainian drone experts ends up being relatively limited, the deal still provides opportunities for our domestic industry to grow.

Carney has committed to giving Ukraine one third of Canada’s new drones, which means that Canadian suppliers will have countless chances to test, and iteratively improve, their wares in real-world conditions. Such practical experience is invaluable and is precisely why Kyiv has managed to become a global leader in modern warfare.

From this perspective, it might be helpful to think of the funds spent on these drones as being analogous to a research-and-development project, one that will allow Canada to proactively innovate alongside Ukrainians, rather than just following their lead.

This cost may seem high to some, but it represents only a sliver of our overall defence budget. Ottawa has, on average, provided around $1.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine each year — which is roughly three per cent of Canada’s 2026 defence budget of $62.7 billion.

Using this as an anchor figure, it seems that sending Ukraine a large number of drones would not be particularly expensive (at least in the context of national defence, which is never cheap), and would pay enormous dividends by slingslotting Canada into battle-tested modernity.

National Post

Last week, a report by Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Eric Kaufmann and co-authors detailed the high cost of the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) quota system in academia. They showed that the prestigious Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program — a $300 million annual federal expenditure to keep research talent in the country — has sacrificed excellence in pursuit of diversity.

Specifically, the discriminatory recruitment of Black, Indigenous, and female CRCs diminished research productivity: these “equity-deserving” groups were 10 to 15 per cent less productive than whites, Asians and males after controlling for career length and discipline. They estimated that EDI discrimination costs the CRC program about $36 million every year — amounting to a 12 per cent tax to support a policy that slows science.

Yet discrimination persists despite every CRC “equity target” having been met or exceeded. For example, the 2029 quota for non-whites (the “racialized” category) is set at 22 per cent. That target was surpassed long ago, and the proportion of non-white chair holders now stands at 34 per cent.

Another study published last week found little reliable evidence for EDI quotas. This comprehensive analysis by Concordia University’s Zachary Patterson and co-authors concluded that, while science can benefit from interdisciplinarity, there is “little empirical evidence that diversity, as defined narrowly by demographic or identity diversity, improves scientific output and impact.”

While discriminatory quotas capture public attention — they’re highly visible, morally dubious and easily measurable — other, more insidious, costs of EDI are less appreciated. Foremost among them is compelled political speech.

That’s no exaggeration: scientists must personally express support for EDI to qualify for many federal research grants. Venturing even into classically liberal territory risks rejection.

I speak from experience. In 2025, my Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) was not renewed despite receiving high scores on the scientific components of my application. The key problem was that I failed to “describe an approach to recruit diverse (Highly Qualified Personnel) and provide an inclusive training environment.”

Some of my colleagues defend EDI requirements as little more than a reasonable request for a management philosophy. Accordingly, I gave NSERC the benefit of the doubt and wrote my application under this milder reading, which allowed me to comply without pretending to believe things I do not. While making clear I objected to discriminatory EDI quotas, I proposed an intellectually open lab that welcomes people of diverse political views. I reasoned that science best flourishes when we recruit from the widest possible swathe of society, including the many Canadians who oppose EDI .

It didn’t work.

That’s because in EDI-speak, “diverse” means non-white, women and “2SLGBTQIA+”, while an “inclusive” environment protects progressive sensibilities from offence. A colour-blind lab that welcomes EDI-skeptics fails on both counts. The safest path to a research grant is to signal ideological compliance. It is unwise to distance yourself from the aspects of EDI you find objectionable.

A senior university administrator told me as much. I need not sincerely agree with EDI, I was told, but I should allow NSERC reviewers to think otherwise. In the world of EDI, that is not deceit. It is considered pragmatic — responsible, even — to keep one’s lab running, to keep training students and advancing science.

But this quiet compliance, where the gate is wide and the way is easy, leads scientists further astray: EDI culture is now normalizing deception.

I recently attended a workshop on the EDI sections of research grants. I asked how to handle the large body of empirical evidence against EDI versus the weak and discredited studies in favour of it. The answer: just cite supporting evidence. We were reminded that, as scientists, we are good at finding statistics to please reviewers.

Nobody else in the room seemed bothered. I turned back to my table, and, looking over my laptop, asked the person across from me if they thought this was okay. “Look,” they said, “every country has an ideology. Canada has chosen this one. We just have to live with it.”

Canada may well have chosen an ideology. What it should not do is make federal science funding depend on pretending the evidence agrees.

National Post

In a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report published last week, authors Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids dare to ask what seems to be, for some, a forbidden question in Canada: Does prioritizing diversity in hiring mean losing excellence?

The claim that equity leads to research excellence is made regularly. Our national research funding agencies declare that equity “strengthens research outputs and increases the overall excellence of research,” and the Canada Research Chairs program itself, which mandates diversity quotas, insists that “Achieving a more equitable, diverse and inclusive Canadian research enterprise is essential to creating the excellent, innovative and impactful research necessary to seize opportunities.”

The MLI report set out to test that claim using the CRC program, which was created in 2000 to reverse the brain drain of Canada’s brightest minds abroad, hardly a solved problem.

Since 2017, partly in response to human rights tribunal claims and criticism that it wasn’t diversifying fast enough, the CRC program imposed diversity quotas: universities that didn’t meet them risked losing chairs altogether. It worked. White male representation fell from roughly 80 per cent of positions to about 25 per cent today. So far, so good, you might say — why shouldn’t the chairs roughly reflect the population?

The MLI report then asks what the consequence has been — and here’s where things get controversial. It tries to measure how research excellence changed alongside these shifts, using h-index (a widely used, not uncontroversial metric) to score every chair-holder, controlling for sex, ethnicity and career length as a proxy for age, then putting a dollar figure on the resulting gaps. The methods are interesting, defensible and not beyond critique.

The report finds that there has been a real trade-off. Some equity gains — hiring more Asian-heritage CRCs, for instance — show no trade-off at all. But on average, research metrics are weaker for female CRCs and for Black and Indigenous scholars, even after the study’s controls for career length and discipline. The report also finds a rise in politicized language in CRC research descriptions, concentrated in the social sciences.

As you can imagine, this has not gone over well in certain circles.

The most dramatic — and most telling — reply came from Alex Usher, a prominent higher education consultant who sells his expertise to university administrations across the country. Usher was so offended that he wrote a letter to MLI director Brian Lee Crowley and published it on Bluesky, calling the report “the worst piece of social science I have ever seen published by a Canadian think tank” and “racist nonsense.” His argument: the authors hadn’t done the most basic statistical work, failing to account for how age and career length affect h-index, or how it varies by discipline, which makes comparing a historian to a chemist absurd. All the study really showed, he argued, was that white males are more likely to work in the sciences.

His conclusion: “This is not just gutter social science: it is a drive-by smear. Some people would call it clearly racist and sexist.”

This sounds horrible. Surely the think tank would retract the report and try to salvage its reputation? Not quite — because the report doesn’t make the errors Usher accuses it of, not even close. It explicitly controls for both career length and discipline. Kaufmann replied that both of Usher’s main criticisms were “manifestly false, and even a cursory read of the report would have shown this very clearly.”

So why make the critique? And how does someone steeped in assessing statistical reports miss the errors in his own? He accuses the authors of dumb, obvious mistakes, then makes much the same mistake himself.

Kaufmann’s explanation: motivated reasoning. In a world where questioning equity puts you beyond the pale, perhaps you simply assume any study that dares address the issue must be flawed, and grasp at the first argument to hand.

This is, sadly, how humans tend to think. Greater education and higher IQ don’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning. If anything, they make you better at rationalizing why people you disagree with are wrong. It’s exactly why viewpoint diversity matters in higher education: so others can catch the biases you can’t see in yourself.

Scroll through the replies to Usher’s post and you’ll find them littered with congratulatory comments from distinguished professors across the country, all piling on, insulting MLI, accusing the authors of racism and agreeing that right-wing ideas are simply beyond consideration. Usher is so certain that others will agree that he calls Kaufmann a “sh-tbag,” saying Kaufmann should debate him, with Usher promising to “jam this argument so far up your rectal cavity you’ll gain a new nostril.”

We are not living in the world of normal academic debate here.

And here is the danger social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warned about years ago in describing “structural stupidity”: information environments congratulate us for our weakest thoughts and reward us for presenting the worst-case version of those we disagree with, until it becomes easy to assume we’re right and everyone else the fool.

To be fair, there are real criticisms to make of the report. Usher’s point that the MLI press release foregrounds numbers more dramatic than what the full report supports is a legitimate complaint about framing. But it is definitely not evidence of “the worst piece of social science” anyone has ever seen.

What the MLI report is doing is useful: engaging openly with a debate that much of higher education won’t admit is a debate at all. My guess is plenty of academics privately entertain the possibility that equity doesn’t automatically produce excellence, but they don’t publicly say so because it means risking your reputation. As a result, the only people left asking are on the political right, who can then be dismissed, as Usher shows, simply with an accusation of racism, a charge that delegitimizes the question before it’s even considered.

Usher did exactly this to another MLI report four years ago, one I co-authored with Zachary Patterson of Concordia University. That report surveyed ideological conformity and self-censorship in Canadian universities, including whether professors believed diversity should be valued over their discipline’s core intellectual standards.

For asking that question, we too were accused of racism. Usher published a critique alleging assorted methodological problems; when we replied , showing he’d missed the sections addressing every one of them, he simply didn’t respond.

In the case of my report, and again now with MLI’s “The Equity Excellence Trade-Off,” Usher didn’t fact-check the report. He fact-checked the room — and the room agreed with him. Why wouldn’t it, given what we know, on average, about the ideological make-up of the profession?

National Post

It is dismal and unsurprising that Canada has joined with 11 other western countries in purporting to abandon the importation of anything coming from areas of the West Bank of the Jordan River that have recently been encroached upon by Israeli settlers. It is embarrassing that any of these countries would at this critical point In the Middle East join in such a futile gesture. The announcement was accompanied by a pompous reassertion of the ambition of these 12 countries to assist in a two-state solution to the Palestinian question. (The other states are Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.)

The Palestinians are not a distinct nationality but are essentially the Muslim and Christian Arabs of the former League of Nations Mandate taken from Ottoman territory at the end of the First World War that are not now located within Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or the borders of Israel prior to the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The notion of a Palestinian state was popularized by Arab nationalists led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954 to 1970), in order to stir up antagonism to the State of Israel, and to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment that was being inflicted upon almost all of them by their rulers.

The fate of the Palestinians has been a tragic one, as the Arab powers declined to assist in relocating them from fetid refugee camps that were simply terrorist breeding grounds. In their desperation, when given the chance, because of President George W. Bush’s blind faith that democratic elections would always elevate a democratic government, they empowered the Hamas terrorists in Gaza and the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and both are dedicated with suicidal determination to the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel was endorsed by the United Nations as a Jewish state in the recent aftermath of the destruction of most of the European Jews and half of the Jewish population of the world, approximately six million people, along with an approximately equal number of other victims of the Nazi death camps.

No member state of the United Nations has greater international legitimacy, other than the founding and convening powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and to the extent that it represents the disintegrated Soviet Union, Russia. Canada and other countries joined when the United Nations was founded or subsequently, but Israel’s creation was supported by the United Nations by joint motion of the United States and the USSR (though because the Arab side rejected partition, the Jewish state did not emerge until after the 1948 war). Its borders remain notoriously disputed but it’s legitimacy as a homeland for the Jews is absolutely unquestionable. The Jews are, in addition, the senior local ethnic and religious group, having been in the land of Israel starting more than 4000 years prior to the birth of the Prophet Mohamed.

The Palestinians could have had a state at any time in the last 35 years but their leaders, whether in the Palestine Liberation Organization or in Hamas, want a state that includes Israel and the return or immigration to Israel of enough Arab Muslims to be a governing majority with the declared intention of expelling, subjugating, or massacring the Jewish population, (one more time).

The action of these twelve countries blundering into this terribly vexed controversy with absurd symbolic pieties of no consequence just emphasizes how fatuous the attempts of these economically (except for Norway, a petro-state) and politically derelict countries to assert themselves have become. The one thing that all the parties in the horribly violent and complex Middle East could agree upon is their disdain for these pretentious interlopers. These countries are unctuously imposing absurd and unenforceable sanctions that will fall most heavily on the many thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel and return to the West Bank each day, (something of a local economic elite). Most of these countries, except to an extent Poland, have a long and distinguished democratic history, (over 50 years for Spain and Portugal, centuries for the others), comparatively free of antisemitic outrages.

None of them has imposed such insulting strictures on China or scores of other countries in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, that are brutal dictatorships and routinely employ what could only be described as slave labour. Israel is a cacaphonous democracy that in deference to the historic sorrows and agonies of the Jewish people, the most horrible of them still within living memory, scrupulously upholds individual rights. (Israeli Arabs are the freest of any Middle Eastern or North African Arab, which is why they almost never emigrate.) Some of the conduct of some of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, like some of the conduct of their Palestinian neighbours, has been reprehensible. Since Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is not accepted by the contending factions of Palestinian leadership, and most of the violence committed within the Palestinian areas of the West Bank is committed by Palestinians, it is abusively unjust to heap upon Israel, a society with a much more civilized ethos than those who dispute its rightful existence, the entire responsibility for violence in the West Bank. This manifestly unjust gesture of symbolic impotence betokens the moral collapse of much of the West. From when the great western democracies went to war against the Nazis and their allies 85 years ago to the last ten years, the nine accuser countries that have been pillars of democracy throughout that time, would have been judicious about the Middle East, and they would have emphasized the civil rights of their entire populations.

Instead, most of them have allowed their democracy to atrophy in cowardly submission to the practice of large minorities within each national Muslim minority to lead a relentless assault of fluctuating intensity on the long established but demographically smaller Jewish minority in their midst. (Norway is innocent of this, since because of its great per capita oil wealth, it severely restricts immigration and has no grievances against their 2,000 Jews, one twenty-fifth of one percent of the whole population.) The prime minister is undoubtedly correct when he states that there is a large overlap between Muslim and pan-Canadian values. He degrades and insults all Canadians when he truckles to that minority of Canadian Muslims afflicted by Israelophobia. The most galling aspect of this widespread moral cowardice, apart from the mealy-mouthed doubletalk of authorities pretending to be righteous when they’re in fact grovelling to the most unsavory popular instincts, is that a gesture of moral leadership on this issue would receive overwhelming public support. All Canadians should be ashamed of the antisemitic fellow-traveling of our federal government.

National Post

The trade war with the United States has many worried about Canada’s future. Can we truly survive against an opponent so much bigger, richer and stronger than us? How do we defend against an unpredictable adversary with leaders who do not play by conventional rules? What can we do to fight back on a modern battlefield where it is not easy to decipher what is real, fake or half-true?

There are no easy answers, but there are strong clues. And there is one group of people — here in Canada and around the world — that might very well be able to help Canada find its path forward. They, too, have been defending themselves against a multi-front onslaught in recent years, forced to reinvent their community for today’s realities. From defence to social media, institution-building to national engagement, their lessons about what has worked — and what hasn’t — are applicable to Canada as a whole.

I am talking about the Jewish people.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jews around the world have been forced to fight against a co-ordinated attack built on lies, hate and media manipulation. They have had to reorient themselves, change their habits, assess their future and invest in things they never thought they would have to. Jewish successes, and failures, offer useful lessons as Canada navigates this trade war. They can be boiled down to six key areas.

1. Defending ourselves: Canadian Jewish communities now spend about $40 million annually on security. The bill for some larger synagogues and institutions exceeds $500,000 a year. These funds could be helping families in need, or go towards education and other cultural institutions, but the Jewish community has correctly understood that it first needs to be secure. Canada has increased its defence spending as of late but more needs to be done. Canada should use this moment as an opportunity to rebuild its shabby Forces, invest in natural resources and project real influence on the global stage.

2. Build culture: Ten years ago, Canadians rallied around the Tragically Hip’s final concert, which drew a national audience of 11.7-million people across TV, radio and digital. If we were to broadcast something now and tell every Canadian, “This is what we are all going to watch tonight, together,” what would it be? It’s hard to see any answer, aside from maybe an Olympic hockey final, and that is a problem. By contrast, since October 7, Jews have been bolstering their cultural connections, with art that speaks to the current condition, but that also laughs at it. And where artistic communities have refused to make space for Jews, they are building their own. A rebuilt national culture that engages all Canadians, not just artistic and political in-groups, would do wonders for the heart and soul of Canada.

3. Social media: For almost three years, Jews have been fighting a war on modern media platforms. The reality is that the community is simply not big enough to beat manipulative algorithms and the spreading of blatant lies by malicious, often nameless trolls. Efforts to combat misinformation may be laudable but they are ultimately useless on a playing field rigged in favour of the other side. Canada, too, is facing a social media war that we cannot win — and we shouldn’t try to. If Jews spent 50 per cent less time fighting with idiots online, they’d have much more energy and resources for more useful causes. Similarly, there’s no point in trying to out-meme the Americans. Save those resources for the real world.

4. Turn inward: Jews know that they can’t count on anyone else to save them. Sure, the community has friends and allies — people who are genuinely angered by the state of antisemitism in Canada and around the world — but there are not enough of them, at least not yet. Instead, Jews have empowered themselves and built a much more cohesive community as a result. Canada needs to do the same, because no one is coming to save us. Not our allies, not even the Democrats.

5. Drawing lines: There will inevitably be some Canadians who, for occasionally valid reasons but more often just to gain attention, will take our opponent’s side in this fight. It is important to emphasize that they are small in number and do not represent what Canada is about. The Jewish community has had to deal with a similar phenomena — the “as-a-Jew” crowd that bolsters antisemitism under the guise of its assumed “truths.” Fighting with what’s supposed to be one’s own team may feel icky, but when people are doing more harm than good, that is what needs to be done.

6. Harness the grassroots: Since October 7, countless new Jewish groups have emerged — volunteer security services, small advocacy organizations that punch above their weight and new digital mavericks building large communities that know how to organize. Established Jewish organizations have a mixed record when it comes to making space for these nascent groups, but it’s truly a no-brainer to enable grassroots groups to help build the community. Similarly, Canadian governments and institutions at all levels should embrace and support grassroots organizations that are in it for the right reasons. These are our future leaders, and they know how to manoeuvre and reach people in ways that bigger institutions simply can’t.

Canada’s imperative amid this new reality should be clear. More than anything, the trade war is a tremendous opportunity to think deeply about the nation we want to be and to build it in our own image. If we don’t make significant changes, and quickly, we could lose everything — just ask the Jews. Or better yet, learn from them about how to deal with bullies, and make this country stronger in the process.

National Post

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NEW YORK — The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Virginia by al-Qaida operatives could not have arrived at a more loaded moment for America. Along with falling on the first night of the Jewish New Year, Rosh HaShana, the sombre, quarter-century milestone took place Friday as the role of Islam — and particularly Islamic extremism — occupy an increasingly oversized space in U.S. politics.

Call it the “Mamdani effect” — and not the one which has helped usher in a slew of Democratic socialist candidates across both New York City and the entire nation following the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last November. But rather the impact of the city’s first Muslim mayor, who’s made elevating his faith a personal passion , if not a priority — matched in its fervour only by his equally vocal disdain for Zionism, Israel and Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Make no mistake, the issue with Mamdani is not his faith, but rather his fanaticism. As Abe Greenwald wrote on Wednesday in Commentary Magazine, Mamdani is not guilty of extremism simply by association — it’s that so many of his associates happen to be extremists. And this includes many, like streamer-provocateur Hassan Piker, who’ve openly cheered the 2001 attacks by al-Qaida, along with men such as Ramzi Kassem — who for nearly a decade defended the Saudi al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Al-Darbi, only for Kassem to be made Chief Counsel by Mamdani mere hours after the mayor was inaugurated in January.

No wonder over 100,000 family members of September 11 victims signed a petition this summer demanding Mamdani be kept away from the memorial events in Lower Manhattan. The mayor, unsurprisingly, refused to listen — turning what should have been a moment of reverence and solemnity into a personal and political agenda-op for a mayor who never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to say or do or believe in the right thing.

Mamdani was hardly alone at the memorial on Friday, but he was among the largest egos on the dais. That’s because America’s most grandiose political ego, President Donald Trump, stuck close to Washington today, headlining the commemoration at the Pentagon, where he unsurprisingly tied the legacy of 9/11 with his unresolved — and increasingly costly — stalemate in Iran.

Instead, Vice-President JD Vance represented the administration in Lower Manhattan, which was actually even more fraught and problematic. Protocol has always insisted that no September 11 speech ever skew political. But Vance — already jockeying for his rightful place on the 2028 presidential ballot — has made politicizing Muslims and the Middle East one of his latest obsessions.

There is, of course, Vance’s increasingly vocal disdain for Israel. Then there’s the VP’s headlining address at the first-ever midterm Republican National Convention in Dallas over the weekend. There, yet again, Vance took stabs at Egyptian-American Senate candidate Adbul el-Sayed of Michigan, who’s repeatedly campaigned with Piker and has made the Israel-Gaza conflict an anchor of his campaign.

Along with hitting back at el-Sayed’s insinuations earlier this month that Vance’s (caucasian) family would have rejected the Vice President’s Indian-American wife for her race, Vance described el-Sayed as embodying a Democratic party that “can find sympathy for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.” Vance’s focus on el-Sayed has been so strident that Reuters declared that “Republicans are making Muslims a campaign issue in the 2026 U.S. midterms” earlier this week. Such sentiments could easily have marred the 9/11 memorial events, as Vance and Mamdani officially interact for the first time. Luckily, Vance showed up and remained silent.

Meanwhile, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani for mayor, is also coming under increasing scrutiny as she battles for her political survival against her insurgent Republican rival Bruce Blakeman. Late last month, Hochul was photographed attending Friday prayers at a Manhattan Islamic center clad in a traditional hijab. The move sparked heavy criticism from conservatives including Blakeman and Trump, some accusing Hochul of “bending the knee to Islam.”

Hochul is now just a few points ahead of Blakeman, according to recent polls, reflecting the widespread frustration with the governor over her appeasement to Mamdani’s radical economic agenda. Blakeman, who is Jewish, is also making the most of Jewish frustration with New York City’s still rising antisemitism epidemic, which many have attributed to Mamdani.

As he has done for years, Blakeman appeared at the World Trade Center events, placing him alongside Hochul and Mamdani as thousands commemorated the most deadly attack by Islamists in U.S. history. The optics were as uncomfortable as they were consequential for all three, who hold the fate of New York’s security and economy in their adversarial hands.

Then there’s former New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani, who arrived to the memorial in a wheel chair. He said little, but everyone there already knew what he was thinking. Giuliani, who was infamously crowned “America’s Mayor” in the wake of the terror attacks, joined those victims’ families in demanding that Mamdani stay home. So has former New York Governor George Pataki, who like Giuliani was in office a quarter-century ago.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) at New York City September 11th 25th Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony pic.twitter.com/ctq0lDxrik

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 11, 2026

Mamdani, as ever, knows how to play this melee to his advantage, and has released some 170,000 documents indicating politicians from all parties purposely misled the public about the severity of the air quality following the Twin Towers’ collapse. More people have died from airborne illnesses since the terror attacks than from the attacks themselves, said Mamdani earlier this week.

It’s a masterstroke in political calculation and obfuscation, positioning Mamdani as the arbiter of New York’s moral consciences rather than its moral decay. Ultimately, yet again, the mayor — who was just a kid on September 11 — had the last laugh at Ground Zero today, literally. Even before the crowds began to thin, social media was outraged and abuzz with images of the mayor chuckling alongside Queens Congresswoman (and fellow Democratic Socialist) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while the names of the terror victims were read out.

Tacky and tone-deaf, Mamdani once again hogged all of the headlines for all of the wrong reasons. Is it any wonder so many wanted him to stay home?

National Post

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