Technology was supposed to scatter power. Early internet visionaries hoped that the digital revolution would empower individuals to break free from ignorance, poverty and tyranny. And, for a while at least, it did. But today, ever-smarter algorithms are learning to predict — and shape — our every choice, enabling unprecedentedly effective forms of centralized, unaccountable surveillance and control. The coming AI revolution may even render closed political systems more stable than open ones — where transparency, pluralism, checks and balances, and other key democratic features could prove liabilities in an age of exponential change. If openness long gave democracies their edge, could it be their undoing tomorrow?

Two decades ago I sketched the “J-curve,” which links a country’s openness to its stability: mature democracies are stable because they are open, consolidated autocracies are stable because they are closed and countries stuck in the messy middle tend to crack under stress.

But this relationship isn’t static; it’s shaped by technology. Back then, the world was riding a decentralizing telecommunications and internet revolution that connected people everywhere and armed them with more information than they’d ever had access to before, tipping the scales toward citizens and open political systems. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union to the colour revolutions in eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East, global liberalization appeared inexorable.

That momentum has since slammed into reverse. The decentralizing information and communications technology revolution gave way to a centralizing data revolution built on network effects, digital surveillance and algorithmic nudging. Instead of diffusing power, this technology concentrated it, handing the small number of actors who control the largest datasets — whether governments or technology companies — the ability to shape what billions see, do and believe.

As citizens were turned from principal agents to objects of technological filters and data collection, closed systems gained ground. And so, the gains made by the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring were reversed. Hungary and Turkey have muzzled their free press and politicized their independent judiciaries. Chinese President Xi Jinping has consolidated power and reversed two decades of Chinese economic opening. Most dramatically, the United States has turned from the world’s leading exporter of democracy — however inconsistently and hypocritically — to the leading exporter of the tools that undermine it.

The explosion of artificial intelligence capabilities is about to supercharge these trends. Models trained on our individual private data will soon “know” us better than we know ourselves, programming humans faster than we can program them and transferring even more power to the handful of actors who control the data and algorithms.

Here, the J-curve warps. As AI spreads, both tightly closed and hyper-open societies grow fragile, bending the curve into a U. Over time, as the technology improves and control over the most advanced models becomes consolidated, AI could harden autocracies and fray democracies, flipping the shape back toward an inverted J whose stable slope now favours closed systems.

In this world, the Chinese Communist Party converts its vast data troves, state control of the economy and existing surveillance apparatus into a durable political advantage. The United States drifts toward a more top-down, kleptocratic, technopolar system where a small club of tech titans exerts growing influence over public life in pursuit of private interests. Both systems become similarly centralized — and dominant — at the expense of citizens, with countries like India and the Gulf states heading the same way while Europe and Japan risk geopolitical irrelevance (or worse, internal instability) as they fall behind in the race for AI supremacy.

Is there any escape from this dystopian future? Perhaps, if decentralized open-source AI models end up on top. In Taiwan, engineers and activists are crowdsourcing an open-source model built on DeepSeek, hoping to keep advanced AI in civic rather than corporate or state hands. Success could restore some of the decentralization the early internet once promised — though it could also lower the barrier for malicious actors to deploy harmful capabilities. For now, however, momentum lies with closed models centralizing power.

History offers at least a sliver of hope. Every previous technological revolution — the printing press, railroads, broadcast media — first destabilized politics, then forced new norms and institutions that eventually restored balance between openness and stability. The question is whether democracies can adapt once again before AI writes them out of the script.

• Chris Selley: We aren’t slaves to AI, unless we want to be
• Colby Cosh: The lifelike nature of artificial intelligence

NEW YORK CITY — It is a welcome and humane gesture amidst the inhumanity of war.

Last month, the only Catholic church in Gaza, which has served as a refuge for hundreds during the Israel-Hamas war, was damaged by Israeli fire. Shrapnel flew throughout the complex, killing three people and injuring the parish priest. The tiny Catholic community in Gaza has been the subject of special concern for Catholic leadership; the late Pope Francis would call every evening to check in with the pastor.

The Israel Defence Forces said the bombing was a mistake, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Pope Leo XIV to explain what happened. Israeli diplomats throughout the world got in touch with local Catholic leaders to offer regrets and apologies for the misfire. But the growing international atmosphere of distrust over Israeli policy and intentions in Gaza made the accidental bombing another point of friction.

Thus when New York’s American Jewish Committee (AJC)

announced a donation

of US$25,000 (C$34,400) to repair the damaged Holy Family Church, it was most welcome. The funds will be conveyed through the Archdiocese of New York.

I mention it because the AJC’s gesture, though small, showed a humanity that the Israeli government has struggled to manifest to the world. I first engaged in Israeli advocacy more than 20 years ago, and never in that time have the very motives and good intentions of an Israeli government been so questioned by its longtime friends.

In

a scathing essay

this week on antisemitism, Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States (2009-2013), argued that the late Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed last year by Israeli forces in Gaza, gambled that “the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy and lustful for the blood of innocents and children” would work to the advantage of Hamas, even as it lost military battles.

“In betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot,” writes Oren, noting the explosion of antisemitism worldwide, including in Canada.

In light of the ongoing food crisis in Gaza, Oren adds words that are painful for Israel’s friends to read, namely that Israel’s current government has “enhanced the Palestinians’ ability to tap into western prejudice.”

He continues: “Undoubtedly, there are many hungry people in Gaza and numbers of them may have starved during this war. Israel’s erratic policy of supplying, then denying, then again supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza, often in woefully insufficient amounts and by inefficient means, surely exacerbated the food shortage. And Israel’s failure to explain and defend its policies has been nothing short of monumental. All that, combined with settler violence, the racist remarks of prominent government ministers and the selfie videos of soldiers rejoicing over Gaza’s demolition, heighten the odds that Sinwar’s bet paid off.”

Such comments are not hard to find among Israel’s stalwart defenders — Oren is one — in Israel and abroad. The conclusion has been reached, by a significant number of Israelis, and by a wide consensus of Israel’s longstanding friends, that the Netanyahu government’s policies, and perhaps even disposition, are inhumane. All Israeli advocates make the distinction between support for Israel’s existence and security in general and the particular policies of any specific government, but it is lamentable that the current government has so damaged Israel’s standing.

We have arrived then at the 30-year and 20-year consequences of that most consequential figure, Benjamin Netanyahu. Next year, astonishingly, he will mark the 30th anniversary his first election as prime minister, an opponent, then and now, of a Palestinian state, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a step towards that. Twenty years ago this week, he resigned as finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, objecting to the Gaza withdrawal policy executed that summer.

Along the way, Netanyahu has won many arguments and achieved strategic and military victories, as even his political opponents would concede. Yet now he is losing friends even more quickly than he is defeating enemies.

This week, 20 years to the day after his 2005 resignation from cabinet, he announced that Israel would retake all of Gaza, fully occupying the territory. At what cost in Israeli and Palestinian lives he cannot know.

Twenty years ago Sharon withdrew from Gaza on the grounds that the continued Israeli presence could not justify the cost in material, security and international esteem. Netanyahu is now back, bigger than ever, willing to bear higher costs in material, security and international esteem.

Israel’s military leadership and most Israelis disagree, but Netanyahu is determined to vindicate his position of 20 years ago. This time there is no danger that the finance minister will resign. Bezalel Smotrich has made little secret of

his desire

to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. Just this week, he posed in front of a “

Death to Arabs

” graffito — which he disavowed after it was widely criticized.

Thus Netanyahu plans on a more intense war and a more intense crisis of displacement and hunger, to achieve goals that the previous 22 months of war, displacement and hunger have not completely achieved.

Israel’s friends praised Sharon’s withdrawal in 2005. Israel’s friends oppose Netanyahu’s pulverization strategy now. The prime minister is convinced that they were wrong then, and are wrong now.

National Post

• Michael Higgins: Cousin of hostage Evyatar David speaks out about the dangers of appeasing Hamas
• Geoff Russ: Alignment of decolonialists and anti-Israel radicals a dangerous threat to the West

Montreal – An identifiably Jewish man was walking with his family in a quiet Montreal neighbourhood where a large Hasidic Jewish community makes its home, when he was violently attacked on Friday afternoon. He was repeatedly punched to the ground, his kippah ripped from his head and thrown into a splash pad.

The assault, caught on video and widely shared on social media, shows his young daughter clutching his arm as it unfolded. He ended up in hospital. His attacker fled.

The incident should have sparked an immediate and forceful response from our political leaders, police, and community officials.

On social media, at least, there has been some action — mostly from Jewish organizations and a handful of mostly conservative politicians.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) called the attack “a shocking act of antisemitic violence in broad daylight” and demanded “an unequivocal response from police, political leaders, and civic society.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said: “No family should have to live in fear in Canada. We must stop the antisemitism that has exploded in our communities.”

Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman was even more blunt: “Revolting.”

Shame on every single politician who has emboldens these thugs with the confidence to spew their venomous antisemitism without consequence. Shame on those who are silent and indifferent — or worse, hollow with yet another empty condemnation. This guy should face real consequences and those in power need to realize what they are allowing in Canada.

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said: “I am troubled by the violent and unacceptable attack on a father from the Jewish community. My thoughts are with the victim and their loved ones. The Montreal police will shed full light on this disturbing incident.”

Was this attack intentional — motivated by antisemitism — or was it the act of someone with untreated mental illness? We don’t yet know. But we do know it happened in an environment where intimidation, harassment, and violence against Jews have been steadily escalating — and where condemnation from those in power has been hesitant at best.

In recent days and weeks, protesters have shown up outside Mélanie Joly’s private home and Anita Anand’s constituency office, forcing staff to work remotely.

Canada’s oldest continuously open synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, has been desecrated. A Montreal4Palestine protester scrawled “Only Good Cop is a Dead Cop” on the pavement. And at “Wild Pride,” a pro-Palestinian Pride event in Montreal, organizers hosted an “Intifada on the Dance Floor” party while posting antisemitic tropes and “Death to the IDF” online.

This is not political debate — it’s the normalization of intimidation and, in some cases, the celebration of violence.

On August 6, Hamas, itself, urged supporters to “intensify popular pressure in all cities, capitals, and public squares” over the coming weekend — in both Arabic and English. That call is not abstract. It’s happening here.

It has been said more than once that eventually someone’s going to get hurt. Is this that incident? We don’t have to answer that question. We know what happened was enough to take further action. And yet here we are — same milquetoast response from authorities as everything else.

The graffiti, the threats, the marches. What’s it going to take for someone in a position of authority to end this campaign against the Jewish community? Where are the fellow Montrealers asking what has happened to our city — let alone Toronto, B.C., and the rest of the country?

As a born-and-bred Montrealer, I feel we’ve let some of our Jewish neighbours, friends and family feel alone and unsupported. History will judge us for that, and so much more.

Whether the Montreal attacker was motivated by ideology or mental illness, it is clear the broader climate is making such attacks more likely.

Hate crimes thrive in an environment where they are minimized, dismissed and ignored. Our leaders have a choice: to speak out, clearly and unequivocally, against all forms of hate and political violence — or to tacitly allow these acts to become part of our new normal.

• Adam Zivo: Montreal Pride reverses shameful decision to ban Jewish groups
• Avi Benlolo: Carney needs to recognize Canada’s antisemitism problem

It is difficult for an outsider to get a clear idea of how the Canada-U.S. trade discussions are developing. As frequent readers may recall, I was seriously embarrassed at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hokey election masquerade as Winston Churchill translating the Scarborough Bluffs into the White Cliffs of Dover and shaking his righteous Canadian fist at the much-maligned U.S. President Donald Trump on the farther shore “trying to break us.” He all but promised to fight in the fields and hills (and wine cellars of Rockcliffe and billiard rooms of Westmount and the indoor swimming pools of Rosedale). My civic disappointment was tempered by my longstanding opinion that in politics, anything that works, no matter how outlandish, is acceptable if it isn’t illegal. The vapid farce of Carney’s “finest hour” narrowly passed that test, even if it reflected no credit on him or his voters.

President Trump’s tariff initiatives have been overwhelmingly successful and were based on his correct view that it was outrageous for the United States to be running a trade deficit of over US$1 trillion (C$1.4 trillion), the byproduct of indulgent Cold War trade practices that were used as bribes to fragile allies and nonaligned countries not to get too close to the Soviet bloc. As I had the honour of saying to President Trump, the United States has no real grievance with Canada. We are a fair-trading country and the United States does not have a trade deficit with us if energy is excluded, and much of the energy that it buys is at a knockdown price, which it then sells to third parties at a sizable profit. The Americans were right to complain about the absurdity of our supply management system and its associated tariffs on certain agricultural products, as the best way to raise farm income would be through specific income supplements to farmers, not overcharging the whole country for food. The prime minister appeared to be encouraging us to think that this anomaly would be addressed but it has not been.

Article 34.6 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement stipulates that that agreement runs until 2036 unless a party gives six months’ notice of termination, so there should be time to work something out. Mark Carney appears to be confining his Churchillian shtick to domestic audiences while being rather mousy in Washington. President Trump has made comments about a U.S.-Canadian union because it seemed to him that since we were not seriously paying for our own defence and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said the proposed tariffs would cause the collapse of the Canadian economy, it might be a favour to Canadians to confederate the countries. I had the occasion to say to him that it was very unjust to liken Canada to Mexico, which is not only severely complicit in a quasi-invasion of the United States by swarms of desperate people, but was also engaged in the systematic enticement of American manufacturing to Mexico with the benefit of cheap Mexican labour and subsidized factory construction, to export back into the United States fabricated parts from Chinese companies under the free-trade agreement. Trump said: “You have a point.” It is not impossible to deal with Donald Trump. Canadians are waiting to see if our leader wishes to make love or war — and if, in this case, he is competent enough to do either.

The prime minister has admirably agreed to devote five per cent of GDP to national defence, an area that has been scandalously ignored since the retirement of former prime minister Brian Mulroney more than 30 years ago, even if much of that funding can be spent on projects that are only marginally connected to defence. As I’ve written here and elsewhere ad nauseam for decades, defence is the most economically productive form of public investment as it assists high technology manufacturing and research and the per capita personnel costs are relatively modest, and it is the most efficient adult education opportunity for the members of the Armed Forces. But five per cent of Canadian GDP is over $100 billion in a country overloaded with debt and taxes and running a chronic annual federal deficit.

The prime minister is conducting a rather prudish flirtation with pipelines, trying to reconcile the absolute necessity of increasing Canada’s national income by satisfying some of the world’s raging appetite for our oil and gas with years of his mad green jeremiads and fantasies, producing such inspired nostrums as Carney’s concept of the carbon-neutral pipeline, as if it was proposed to deliver rosewater by pipeline to export markets or eastern Canada. There has been no hint of where the prime minister is leaning in budgetary terms but some hard choices are going to have to be made soon.

The closest he has come to an executive decision so far is his shameful nonsense of threatening to recognize a Palestinian state run by the corrupt, enfeebled, completely inept, mistrusted and totally unrepresentative Palestinian Authority. It’s quavering leader, 89-year-old longtime terrorist supporter Mahmoud Abbas, has made a lot of completely implausible claims of democratizing the bloodstained regime he inherited from Yasser Arafat, which has still not delivered anything of what it promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993, for which Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Hamas invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of Oct. 7, 2023, was intended to be, and was received as, an act of war, and Israel has largely won that war. There can be no peace until the Arab leaders in Gaza and the West Bank are prepared to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields and steals their food, and Israel has achieved a relatively low ratio for urban counter-guerrilla warfare of civilian-to-terrorist casualties. It was an error to have reduced food imports to Gaza between March and May that has now been corrected, but the Hamas terrorist operation must be exterminated to provide any possibility of peace for the Arabs or the Jews. Carney has done us no favours by tagging along behind the impotent posturing of the French and British, who,

ever since the British promised the same territory to the Jews and Arabs at the same time in the Balfour Declaration of 1917

, have never had any policy in the region except to await American initiatives and then posture as being better disposed to the Arabs.

Mark Carney was elected on a false though imaginatively histrionic premise of imminent national danger from the United States. He took over the government that ran this great and rich country into a ditch of capital outflows, declining relative prosperity, slow growth, an unsustainably large public sector, an almost collapsed health-care system and a state of national defence so anemic we would have trouble fending off an attack from angry Greenlanders. Canada is a treasure house with a talented and motivated population and political institutions that have been generally successful though they’re in need of renovation. Carney has been given a great opportunity and a great challenge, and it’s almost show time. On his thin record, we are entitled to hope, but also to fear the worst.

National Post

• Conrad Black: And just like that, the Trump ‘threat’ disappears
• Dan Illouz: Canada should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, not a Palestinian state

Sydney Sweeney’s bust is more powerful than I originally thought.

Last year,

I wrote

about it for the Post. I should have known that the story would necessitate a pair of articles. So, here we are.

In March 2024, after hosting

Saturday Night Live

, Sweeney inspired an online discourse on the death of woke. This unrepentant celebration of her beauty — a rare, exclusionary beauty, as I wrote at the time — indicated a cultural awareness about our return to the basic and anti-woke principle that sex, rather than forced tolerance, sells.

That any of us had caved to external demands to worship the asymmetrical, the unlovely, and sometimes, the unsightly, was

destined to be

a self-limiting state of being. We are wired to notice and appreciate beauty. It is as inescapable a human behaviour as our drive to breathe.

And so, following Sweeney’s

Saturday Night Live

exposure, compulsory worship of conventionally unattractive persons was out, and a return to our basal exaltation of some often indescribable yet universally understood standard of beauty was back in. Then, as now, this cultural shift had nothing to do with “whiteness,” as some critics are trying hard to suggest. Why would it?

Sweeney isn’t beautiful because she is white. Sweeney is white and happens to be beautiful. Beauty clearly comes in all shades, and Sydney’s beauty does nothing to suggest otherwise.

Months passed, and the tempest around Sweeny’s bust calmed to a quiver. Then, Donald Trump became the president of the United States.

Trump’s directives to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport illegal migrants from the U.S. (his

government claims

to have “removed 65,682 aliens, including criminals who threaten public safety and national security” in its first 100 days) has, as we know, resulted in massive and

sometimes violent

protests, and accusations of Trump being motivated by “

white supremacy

” or a desire to bring back Jim Crow era racial segregation laws.

America’s Democrats and Republicans have, perhaps, never been so at odds. Their country is deeply politically divided.

Re-enter Sydney Sweeney, from stage capital “R” Right, with an

American Eagle campaign

about her “good jeans.”

“Genes are passed down from parent to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney says demurely, while zipping up a pair of American Eagle jeans and then staring into the camera lens with her blue eyes. Then the words: “SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS” flash on screen. That’s it.

In any political context outside of Nazi Germany, the denim advertisement would, one might think, reasonably be taken as a just that: an attempt to use a beautiful woman to sell some jeans. What happened, instead, is that Sweeney, with her anti-woke weapons of mass destruction, has become the centre of a left-wing, anti anti-woke fury that beggars belief.

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is being framed as

white supremacist

and

supportive of eugenics

.

Did you know that Sweeney’s adorable dog is a German Shepherd? Did someone say “German”? Uh oh. People on the internet

have decreed

that the pup is a “Nazi pet,” belonging to one “Swastika Sweeney.” It has also emerged that Sweeney is a

registered Republican voter

. Such horror.

An

op-ed in Newsweek

argues that the jeans ad is “a modern eugenics movement proudly re-emerging amid a welcoming political climate.” It dubiously links the “rhetoric” of Trump’s administration to entirely imagined and “horrifying thoughts of what may be happening to immigrants currently being detained by ICE.” All inspired by a denim advertisement.

The only useful part of that statement is regarding a “welcoming political climate.” For the current climate does, in fact, welcome this sort of intellectually dishonest, catastrophizing reaction that we are witnessing on the far-left.

The climate enabled using Sweeney as the easy, no-questions-asked target of a jealous and insecure rage towards all things beautiful. It enabled

invocation of Trump’s ICE raids

to justify the emittance of one final (hopefully) extinction-burst like paroxysm over the dying corpse of wokeness in America.

It is a corpse that now lies in Sweeney’s buxom shadow.

American Eagle’s

stock price

is increasing in the aftermath of the outrage. They have not apologized. They don’t need to: it clearly wouldn’t be good for the company’s bottom line.

Instead, American Eagle released the following

statement

about the campaign on their Instagram account: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story… Great jeans look good on everyone.” A cursory glance at their account reveals models of all skin colours in American Eagle jeans. But why let facts get in the way of woke outrage? Times are desperate; particularly when one side is on the precipice of losing a culture war.

Ladies and gentlemen, it turns out that Sweeney’s breasts were indeed the double-D harbingers of the death of woke.

Smother it, Sydney. Show no mercy.

National Post

• Amy Hamm: Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney’s undeniable beauty
• Michael Higgins: The United Church’s abhorrent excuses for October 7

“The pictures take you back 80 years. But we were promised that those images of a living skeleton wouldn’t come back. The promise was: never again.”

So says a heartbroken Tamar Eshet, cousin of Hamas hostage Evyatar David, who was seen in a recent disturbing

video

being forced to dig his own grave in a narrow tunnel somewhere in Gaza.

In the video, David is pale, his body thin, bony, and wasted.

Hamas released the video only days after Prime Minister Mark Carney joined U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron in saying they would

recognize

a Palestinian state.

Likely emboldened by the announcements, the terrorists were happy to show the world how their depravity was starving the hostages to death. Hamas also said they would not disarm until a Palestinian state was established.

Far from pushing the path of peace forward, Carney and the others have succeeded only in giving succor to the terrorists.

National Post

interviewed Eshet, who believes Hamas saw what the three world leaders were doing and immediately reneged on a hostage deal.

“When you give (Hamas) power, when you give them a prize for their actions, then you are letting them starve the hostages because they say, ‘OK, we are going to get whatever we want anyway.’ Now the world can see the consequences of their actions, of their irresponsibility. (Hamas) took a step back from a hostage deal right now because of everything that happened and they feel like they can do anything. We are giving a prize to terror. Giving them power is justifying terror and the world has to think about what they are doing,” she said.

Evyatar David was 22 years old, a barista in a cafe, when he and his friends attended the Nova music festival that was attacked by terrorists on October 7, 2023.

David and his childhood friend, Guy Dalal, were among the 251 hostages taken by Hamas after the terrorists had butchered 1,200 people. Of those taken, 49 hostages are still in Gaza, but only about 20 are still believed to be alive.

“Evyatar was 22 when he was kidnapped. He was still thinking what to study, what does he want to do with his life” said Eshet.

However, his favourite thing in the world, she said, was playing guitar and he dreamed of becoming a music producer.

“He’s a really calm guy. He’s the advice giver to his friends, they would come to him,” she said. “And we live next to each other. Our houses are close. We are a close family, and ever since October 7, we are even closer.”

As the slaughter began at the festival, David was hiding with friends in some bushes.

“Two of his friends were murdered in a bush right next to him. He was kidnapped with one of his best friends, Guy Dalal. They know each other from kindergarten, and they’re still being held together,” said Eshet.

Well, relatives believe they are being held together, but Hamas isn’t the kind of organization that gives regular updates on its hostages.

In February, the anguished families of David and Dalal watched another Hamas propaganda video showing the two men.

Hamas

filmed

David and Dalal sitting in a van, watching a hostage handover ceremony. But the tantalizing glimpse of freedom was all that the men got. After the ceremony, they were taken back to Gaza and the tunnels where they are being imprisoned.

“We hope that they are still together,” said Eshet.

Then last weekend, Hamas released a new video, this one showing a wretched, emaciated, and clearly starving David. In the video, David marks what looks like a handmade calendar and indicates days when he has eaten and days when he has not. At another point, he is seen digging a hole and says it is to be his own grave.

But if Hamas is trying to convince the world that all of Gaza is starving, the families of the hostages are not convinced.

Eshet says that in the video an arm, presumably of a terrorist, can be seen handing a can of lentils to David. She notes that it is the arm of someone who has been well fed.

Hamas is deliberately starving the hostages, she says, but the terrorists are not going hungry.

“Hamas isn’t “an organization that fights for the Palestinian people. They don’t care about them. They starve them just as much as much as they starve Evyatar. They take away the food, they steal the food from their own people,” Eshet said.

The cruelty in the video was too much for David’s mother.

“His mother hasn’t watched the latest videos because she thinks she would break down if she sees that. She can’t see her son in this condition and she knows she has to be strong and keep on fighting for him and be strong for her other children,” said Eshet, noting that David has an older brother and a younger sister.

“It’s hard. We see the abuse, the torture, the starvation, and how cynically they do that. They use him for a video to show how they starved him. They were proud of it. They wanted to show the world how they’re starving Evyatar. And it breaks my heart to see him fighting to even talk. We can see that he’s using every breath he has to talk. It’s scary because in this condition we really don’t know how much longer he can survive.”

Eshet said she was shocked when she saw the video.

“I didn’t know what I was going to see. I froze. I was shaking and crying, and I didn’t know what to do. You feel so useless and helpless. As a Jewish person, as a person who has family who’s been in concentration camps, to see Evyatar like this, I don’t think there’s a word to describe the feeling: it’s horror, it’s pain.”

Seeing the video of David is a ghastly reminder for his family of the Holocaust and the haunting pictures of starving prisoners in the concentration camps. “Our family is here only because we escaped from the Holocaust,” said Eshet. “A lot of our great-grandparents were in concentration camps and in war camps and only my great-grandmother who came to Israel was the one who survived and had a family.

“We were promised that those pictures would never be seen again. This is the time for the world to say never again, and to make sure it doesn’t happen and to stop it.”

Eshet said the world must unite in bringing the hostages home. “We have to bring all the hostages back home. The world has to speak up, and stop giving Hamas more power and giving prizes for their actions, because that’s what’s been done in the last couple of weeks.”

David and the other hostages may not have much time left, she said. “They may have days or weeks in these conditions. The world must pressure Hamas to first give the hostages decent care, give them food and water and medicine and we know that they have this. That should be the first thing and then to get them back home. But time is not on our side.”

Eshet knows that ending the war and defeating Hamas is no simple thing. “Defeating Hamas is about defeating an idea, an ideology, and it’s much bigger than just the military aspect. It’s more complicated than that. This is all part of a campaign and the world is falling for it right now, they’re giving prizes to (Hamas) for starving Evyatar and for starving their own population. They (the politicians) need to have a responsibility when they do such things. We can’t praise terror. We have to be on the good side of history,” she said.

“I’m not an authority on how to end the war, but I think a hostage deal is the only hope” she said. “And I think it has to be as soon as possible because we’ve just seen that time is critical.”

National Post

• Michael Higgins: The United Church’s abhorrent excuses for October 7
• Terry Glavin: Synagogue vandalism shows being ‘progressive’ no shield against antisemitism

If you thought that the alliance of pro-Gaza activists, radical leftists and proponents of terror would fade away, you were wrong.

Last weekend in Australia, the “March for Humanity” paraded across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. An estimated 100,000 people

marched

to support the people of Gaza amidst a war between Israel and Hamas that has lasted for almost two years.

It was also an opportunity for bad but powerful actors to express their visceral hatred of Australia, and boast of their loyalty to terrorism. The black flag of ISIS was

brazenly waved

amidst the sea of Palestinian flags, while a portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was

held aloft

near the front of the march.

At another rally in Melbourne, an Australian flag was

burned

to a crisp.

Within 48 hours, a synagogue in the British Columbia capital of Victoria was

vandalized

with vicious antisemitic graffiti: “Jews are evil … Palestinians will get their revenge against you child-killing Jew monsters.”

B.C. also played host to the

desecration

of the Canadian flag last year in Vancouver. At a rally co-led by the now-proscribed terror entity Samidoun, the red maple leaf was set alight while activists chanted, “

Death to Canada

.”

Samidoun’s leadership affirmed that the chant was meant literally and that

they desired

the destruction of the “colonial, capitalist state of Canada.”

It would be unfair to castigate every supporter of Gaza as pro-terror or anti-Canadian. On the whole, however, they have shown little to no discomfort about marching alongside their more bloodthirsty counterparts.

Western countries are equated with Israel and categorized as nothing more than artificial colonial states that must be destroyed.

Nothing symbolized this more perfectly than the burning of the Australian flag, which anti-Israel organizer Nasser Mashni

dismissed

as nothing more than a “

piece of silk

.”

That same individual

once remarked

that, “Israel and Australia share two things in common, aside from being a shithole racist, settler colony … they also have the highest incidence of skin cancer. Their skin is designed for northern Europe, where there is not much sun.”

It cannot be denied that there is a racial element to these protests. Anybody regarded as a settler is

considered

 “

subhuman,

” and this has been evident in decolonial protests from Melbourne to

rural B.C

.

Established progressive parties across the West have tried accommodating this movement. They have listened to its demands and increased their pressure on Israel to wind down its military operations.

Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney joined his counterparts in

France

and

Great Britain

by announcing that Canada will

recognize

a Palestinian state in September, albeit under very strict conditions.

These include securing a commitment from the Palestinian Authority (PA) government of the West Bank to hold elections — which have been suspended for 20 years — in 2026. Another condition is that the terror group Hamas be excluded from the electoral process.

Unlikely as it is, let us say that these conditions are met and a sovereign Palestinian state is recognized.

The anti-Israel lobby will not magically disappear, nor will the pro-Hamas, anti-western elements that have bulldozed their way to political power. Their influence has been building for decades, and they will not give it up.

Britain’s unpopular Labour government, elected only last year, has utterly failed to contain the anti-Israel faction of its voters. Former party leader Jeremy Corbyn is set to

co-lead

a

splinter party

of Labour MPs who jumped ship over the war in Gaza.

In the United States, the failure of Kamala Harris to satisfy the demands of Arab-American voters in Michigan led many

to reject

the Democratic Party, and helped flip the state to Donald Trump.

In New York City, socialist and anti-Zionist insurgent Zohran Mamdani successfully weaponized anti-Israel sentiment to

defeat

the state’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, in the city’s Democratic primary.

Mamdani, who is now favoured to be elected in the upcoming mayoral election, has refused to condemn the phrase, “

globalize the intifada

.”

Far from being a purely ethnic phenomenon, Australia’s anti-colonial movement

includes

both immigrants and native-born Australians.

The alignment of decolonial militants and anti-Israel radicals has become a permanent part of western politics. It is also unlikely that the rash of hate crimes perpetrated against Jews in Canada and elsewhere will abate in the near future.

Members of progressive governments have shown a disgraceful tendency to tolerate these incidents. Following the vandalism of the synagogue in Victoria, Liberal MP Will Greaves

condemned

the crime on social media, but that was as far as his party went.

They will not risk alienating the sizable part of the left wing that is obsessed with Gaza. The police are

investigating

the incident, but even if they find the perpetrator, heavy sentences are unlikely.

A Toronto-area man who was arrested after

threatening

to bomb every synagogue in the city received a sentence of just 60 days of house arrest. It seems that would-be terrorists only get timeouts in 2025.

There are two visions of Canada; one as a purely modern, multicultural and tolerant state where every religious and ethnic group is equally valid and can coexist in peace. The other is the Confederation ideal of an Anglo-French union striving for “peace, order and good government.”

Radicals in the anti-Israel movement care for neither. They abuse the Canadian habit of tolerance and spit on the colonial origins of the country.

They are emboldened, angry, and can bend politicians to their will. They will

burn Canada

to the ground if they get the chance, just as they did our flag.

National Post

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