With the support of the CDPQ—known for its disregard for workers—Joly began a major expansion of the company’s operations. Since his purchase of Intelcom, the company has built sorting centres in Montréal and Toronto, representing investments of $31 million. During this period, the number of employees grew from 300 to 2,500, plus another 3,000 “independent” contractors—a euphemism for precarious gig workers.
My last post was a response to an essay by one Hamza Shehryar. Someone who writes about "film, culture, and global politics." In the essay Shehryar insists that Israel didn't kill Charlie Kirk. In fact, the "conspiracy theory" that Israel killed Kirk is harmful to the Left and to the anti-genocide movement in general, because it is not true, it is "antisemitic" and it helps to divide the anti-genocide movement.
Shehryar never explains how it's antisemitic. Throughout the piece he admits that Israel assassinates lots of people. He condemns Israel for all sorts of cruelties and barbarisms. So, why the specific accusation that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk is antisemitic is entirely unclear.
He spends a bit of time explaining that Pestilence Naziyahoo repeatedly going on social media to deny any part of Charlie Kirk's assassination is proof that Naziyahoo/Israel didn't do it. According to Shehryar, Naziyahoo is playing 5th-dimensional chess with the anti-genocide movement. Naziyahoo is deliberately trolling when he gives oxygen to this false and antisemitic conspiracy theory with his constant professions of innocence.
Of course, if the theory ISN'T false, then it couldn't be antisemitic. (How it's antisemitic in any case remains a mystery. Again, Shehryar admits that Israel kills lots of people all the time.)
But Naziyahoo's 5th-dimensional chess playing is still brilliant because, according to Shehryar, Naziyahoo isn't stupid. As I said in my own post, Naziyahoo might very well be stupid. He might just be a corrupt, insane, stupid asshole possessed of ruthlessness and cunning. Donald Trump, Stephen Harper, Doug Ford, ... hell, we all know of all sorts of people who are imbeciles who have clawed their way to the top of an insane system.
Here's Caitlin Johnstone on Naziyahoo's repeated claims of non-involvement:
One of the weirdest things happening right now is how Israel’s prime minister keeps going out of his way to make public statements saying that Israel was definitely not behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In a two-minute video uploaded onto his Twitter account on Wednesday, Netanyahu complained that “Somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder,” saying the allegation “is insane, it is false, it is outrageous,” and that “Charlie loved Israel.”
A few days earlier, Netanyahu appeared on the highly sympathetic Newsmax to spend another couple of minutes ranting about how “insane”, “stupid” and “ridiculous” it is to claim that Israel was behind Kirk’s death, saying he “can’t believe that people are saying that.”
This is like repeatedly going out in public to yell “I did not have a sex dream about my cousin!” so that nobody thinks you had a sex dream about your cousin. People are going to walk away with the strong impression that you probably had a sex dream about your cousin.
But the main prop to Shehryar's stupid essay is the fact that Charlie Kirk was a committed pro-Israel Christian zionist to the end of his life.
Some point towards a seemingly mysterious change in Kirk’s attitudes regarding Israel, even though, until the moment he was killed, he spoke candidly, often with joy, about his contentment at the destruction of Gaza and the killing of Palestinian civilians.
“I used to say: ‘If you, as a gay person, would go to Gaza, they would throw you off of tall buildings.’ Now they don’t have any tall buildings left,” he gleefully exclaimed at an event, not long before he was killed. He quickly followed that comment up with: “Maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims.” Is this the behaviour of someone so “anti-Israel” that they must be taken out?
The picture at the top of this post is the comedienne Gilda Radner, playing her character "Emily Litella." I was just a wee lad when the first line-up of Saturday Night Live was on. But I did recall Radner/Litella would speak at length about a subject that she'd misunderstood and when her mistake was pointed out to her, she'd stop cold, process it and smilingly tell the audience "Nevermind."
Shehryar and St Clair have made as big a mistake as anything the fictional Emily Litella made but they don't have the sense of shame to simply stop.
Because the fact of the matter is that Kirk was planning on breaking with Israel. Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone has a detailed summary of the subject covering three whole articles.
Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.
The Grayzone has spoken to five people with intimate knowledge of Kirk’s meeting with Ackman, which was held in early August. According to one source, Kirk was left upset after the gathering turned into an “intervention” where he was “hammered” for his increasingly skeptical views on the US special relationship with Israel, and for platforming prominent conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events.
A pre-eminent funder of right-wing Zionist and anti-Muslim causes across the Atlantic, Shillman’s millions helped transform Kirk from a young age into one of Israel’s most effective gentile assets.
However, as Kirk drifted from the official, Netanyahu-enforced line on Israel in the past year, expressing frustration with onerous demands from Zionist donors and hosting the leading conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events, Shillman apparently grew resentful.
Do you see what happened there? Shehryar wrote an entire essay condemning as an antisemitic conspiracy theory the idea Israel would have any reason to kill Charlie Kirk. But he exposes himself as COMPLETELY IGNORANT of the FACT that Kirk was angrily breaking with Israel-firsters. Whereas Emily Litella would humbly acknowledge her error and say "Nevermind" Shehryar's falsehoods remain on the site without any corrections.
I realize that a lot of this post is a repeat of the previous one. But I was moved to write it because CounterPunch is supposed to be an analysis AND a NEWS site. And Jeffrey St Clair, on October 1st (when Shehryar's shitty article was published) posted a story that COMPLETELY IGNORED the Grayzone's reporting of Charlie Kirk's break with zionism from MID-SEPTEMBER! Even if Shehryar's mistake is only based on abysmal ignorance as opposed to being zionist propaganda, it is inexcusable. Shehryar was specifically writing about the thesis that the Grayzone was the leading leftist source for and he pretends that he had no idea of what they were actually saying because either he's a lazy idiot or (more likely) he's a paid shill for Naziyahoo's genocidal Israel. Which makes the lazy, stupid, narcissist Jeffrey St Clair a conduit for either journalistic garbage, or zionist hasbara.
It being the case that Shehryar either has shit for brains or he's a pro-genocide scumbag, what is the potential damage from his shitty essay?
Charlie Kirk was a scumbag. A racist, sexist, Christo-fascist, oligarch-serving, right-wing USA-first, nationalist. USA-FIRST. In his deluded worldview, Charlie Kirk (for whatever reasons) thought that Israel enjoyed an oversized influence on the USA's foreign policy, and (when one considers attacks on free speech and other issues) domestic policy as well.
Whatever his motivations were, the fact that Kirk was thinking of breaking with the "no daylight between the USA and Israel" official consensus was a good thing. I find it sickening that Hamza Shehryar is seeking to destroy a left-right consensus on Israel by writing an article based on falsehoods and absolutely baseless arguments about "antisemitism" and "dividing the left."
It's bad enough that liberals and so-called progressives have embraced war and imperialism simply because Democratic politicians are in power when they could be embracing right-wingers who have finally soured on the Forever Wars and who have been distrustful of pro-war propaganda about "defending democracy" and "protecting America" and "global responsibilities." To see a hack like Hamza Shehryar trying to drive a wedge between US-Americans uniting against US-backed, Israeli genocide.
Like it or not, we'll always have conservatives.
I've written a few times about the various studies that show that conservatives have larger amygdala's than non-conservatives. You can look for those posts if you want to. Most people who I've spoken to about this think that I'm insulting conservatives when I say that. Because they're missing the point. Having your antenna more attuned to threats doesn't make you inferior or stupid. Being more quick to anger and acting aggressively can sometimes be a rational survival mechanism. [Democrats believed Trump stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton and they whined online and committed themselves to the shithead Mueller's inquiry and then continued to whine and moan when it inevitably came to nothing. MAGA-heads believed Biden stole the election from Trump and they rioted and invaded the Capital Building. Which side stood up for their beliefs more?]
I say all this because I think that if conservatives have turned against the "Forever Wars" because of the weight of the evidence [whereas worthless liberals and "progressives" have decided that imperialism is okay if a Clinton or an Obama or a Biden is doing it], and if they have turned against their Book of Revelations support for Israel because it just seems that deliberately starving children to death or shooting them in the head when they come to a food distribution to try to avoid starving to death seems wrong. And God Bless Such Conservatives if that is the case.
The Left and the Right could UNITE on opposition to genocide, and so a shameless piece-of-shit, Hamza Shehryar, enabled by another useless-piece-of-shit, Jeffrey St Clair, writes a shitty article on how claiming that Israel killed Charlie Kirk is an anti-Semitic trope that divides the left causes some progressives and leftists to believe that, thereby slowing or stopping the bipartisan consensus that Israel is evil, and, therefore, the loss of any political support for continued USA financing of Israeli debt or currency or weapons.
It was so counter-productive in the extreme to post Shehryar's stupid, ignorant post!
[Candace Owens is a real piece of work. But on Gaza, she's right. And she's been exposing the reality of Kirk's angry separation plan from zionist-firsters and the lies of those who would deny it. The official narrative about the Kirk assassination is ridiculous and to me, it seems that the most likely beneficiary of it is Naziyahoo's Israel.]
Hamza Shehryar is a writer and journalist. He covers film, culture, and global politics.
I honestly don't really know that Israel killed Charlie Kirk. But if you want to insist that Israel didn't do it, you'll have to do much better than this! Let's begin ...
It just occurred to me that the collective response to the horrifying images of the results of Israel's genocidal starvation policy in Gaza sums up our society's probable response to Global Warming. In both of these subjects we have known for a long time what is going on. We have protested to no great effect while our elites have done everything to perpetuate these crimes. We have continued to allow them to get away with it and then we get surprised that a point of no return has been reached.
With Gaza, it's been pretty clear that this was going to happen. The Israelis have been very clear that they want to the total expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine. They have said straight out that they can either stay and be killed or they can leave. The latter option is problematic because none of the neighbouring Arab states will take them and neither will Israel's Western allies. [Witness, for instance, the glacial pace with which Canada processes refugee applications from Gaza.] But the refusal of other countries to take the Palestinians isn't seen as a problem for the Israelis. That's something the Palestinians will have to figure out as the Israelis continue to kill them.
Reading this eloquent description of how Western liberals have destroyed any claims of moral legitimacy:
The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of legitimacy for western liberalism.
Double standards on part of Canada with respect to its declared commitments and values,
particularly with respect to its support for the rules-based international order and the promotion of
international law and human rights risks undermining Canadian diplomatic credibility and
international standing. Moreover, Canada benefits from a rules-based international order in which
the behaviour of powerful states, and their treatment of smaller-states, is regulated by universally
respected and enforced international rules. Canada has recognized that contraventions or
transgressions of international rules by any state threaten its interests, and therefore Canada must
recognize that this applies equally to itself.
Canada’s stated commitments to international law and the promotion of democracy and human
rights is called into question by its trend of exporting arms to states involved in IHL and IHRL
violations. Although Canada is a state party to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), and despite having
some of the strongest arms export controls in the world, a review of past policies shows that these
controls are not always applied in an objective or transparent manner. GAC has applied overly
narrow interpretations of risk in evaluating the potential for Canadian military goods and
technology to be used in violations, often focusing on actual evidence of misuse of Canadian arms
by the recipient state rather than on the prospective, “substantial risk” of misuse as required by its
obligations under the ATT. This has rendered arms exports controls largely reactive rather than
proactive, often responding to abuses involving Canadian arms rather than preventing such abuses
and implicating Canadian-made arms in serious violations of international law. Recent Canadian
arms exports to Israel (both directly from Canada and indirectly from the USA), despite credible
evidence from international institutions of Israeli crimes in Gaza, have exposed further issues in
GAC’s risk assessment methodology. The current volatility in the international system demands
increased prudence in arms transfer practices.
Following a review of these past and current policies, a consideration of Canadian interests and
values, goals and objectives, relevant stakeholders, and programmatic needs, we present three
costed options all aimed at strengthening arms exports risk assessment process and thereby
preventing Canadian complicity in serious violations of international law. Considering all the
relevant factors and pros and cons, we recommend fully incorporating Canada’s ATT
obligations into domestic law and introducing greater external oversight of the export permit
evaluation and risk assessment process via independent advisory committee.
Perhaps someone else might be interested in looking at it too.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
