The ongoing Israel-Hamas war was still the main focus at The Hub this week, with Hub writers taking the media to task, exploring the reaction in our country to the war and analyzing the best path forward for Canada on foreign policy.
The goal of Hub Forum is to bring the impressive knowledge and experience of The Hub community into one place and with that in mind, here are some of the most interesting comments this week.
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The media’s reporting on the war risks going from bad to worse
Monday, Oct. 16, 2023
Just as it is “important to report how civilians are impacted when a state takes action against terrorists” it is equally important for that same media to be truthful. Calling Hamas “militants” is a gross misrepresentation of what they truly are: terrorists. Reporting part of the story is as much a lie as reporting untruths. This is where our MSM fails us all. I find more and more that the same media editorialize and report their insight. Report the news and leave your personal opinions out of it.
— Greg K
“The intermingling, and often misleading use of terms like Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim, Colonizer, Indigenous, and Settler, contribute to the confusion and help create the animosity both in the region and across the western world. A Jewish refuge who emigrated to Israel in the 1950s to escape persecution in Iran could be called an Arab Jew Israeli settler colonizing the region once referred to as Palestine! Many of the Jewish and most of the Muslim people living in the region in 1946 had indigenous roots in Palestine. The Jews became Israelis in 1947 and Muslims living in Gaza and the West Bank became Palestinians in 1964 when Ahmad Shuqayrī helped launch the Palestine Liberation Organization.
No world body has ever acknowledged a state of Palestine, it was simply a name accorded to the region derived from the Philistines (think Goliath) – a people and culture that flourished three millennia ago and died out around 700BCE. Nearly 60 years of referring to the situation as the Arab-Israeli conflict has ingrained that false dichotomy. In reality it a Jewish-Muslim conflict.”
— Lorne Matheson
Our reaction to terror in Israel shows Canada isn’t that divided
Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023
“The MSM news broadcasts that I saw – CTV Toronto and CP24 – and the same stories reported on my local CBC Radio One station didn’t show the same story you talked about. They focused on what they called those ‘supporting Hamas militants’ doing their flag-waving and generally disrupting traffic at a major intersection in Toronto. I didn’t see anything about the PM and our leader of the opposition or Ms. Chow and Mr. Singh denouncing anything about Hamas. I saw nothing of the media calling Hamas what it is – TERRORISTS. So if we don’t insist on truth and fairness in reporting the news, how will we ever know?”
— Greg K.
‘Urban warfare is absolute hell’: The Takeaway: Three key insights from Robert D. Kaplan’s Hub Dialogue
Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023
“Open warfare should be an anachronism. Urban combat is a chaotic nightmare for the combatants and more so for the hapless civilians caught in the crossfire. The geopolitical fallout, assessment of the ‘winner and losers’, and identifying new negative global risks from this tragedy may be immediately relevant in each of the world’s nation’s various ‘state departments’, but the unacceptable human cost of this should be the primary focus, despite our near powerlessness, of every other feeling human being.”
— Rob Tyrrell
“The IDF will not win a conventional military victory in Gaza. A protracted invasion will only foment the conditions to bolster the ranks of Hamas.”
— Michael F.
As rates rise, old people are doing better and young people are doing worse
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023
“In total, the youngest households paid nearly $1 billion more per month in interest. And net of higher interest earnings, those under 45 collectively paid over $1.6 billion more. Those over 65, meanwhile, received $1.6 billion per month more.”
This perfectly encapsulates the way of interest rates tend to younger demographics vs. how older demographics are not feeling the pinch as much, if at all. It also further encapsulates the divide between demographics, especially when older demographics just blatantly claim that younger demographics are “just lazy and want everything handed to them” or “eating too much avocado toast,” not fully realizing that the current economic conditions we’re in are so drastically different when they were our age or younger.”
— Amal Attar-Guzman (Content Editor, The Hub)
“Young people are being unfairly squeezed, are justifiably unhappy about it, and this feeling is dangerous if permitted to fester, especially if nothing happens to address the situation after a likely federal government change.”
— Rob Tyrrell
Canada needs to pick its lanes in an increasingly turbulent world
Friday, Oct. 20, 2023
“I agree with the priorities set in this article with the exception of defense spending. I think what we need to do is find better ways of creating and maintaining peace, better to spend money on foreign aid which will build the ability of a people to fend for themselves than on arms to destroy. If the amount of money used for arms was put into development, if only a fraction was put into development, the cause of peace would be much further ahead. I know some people will say this is a Pollyanna view of life but without dreams, nothing is accomplished.”
— A. Chezzi
“Lloyd Axworthy’s adoption of ‘soft power’ as the foundation for Canada’s foreign policy in the 1990’s has led us to the state we find ourselves in today on the world stage. With little to offer other than words – and even less of substance with which to back them up – it should come as no surprise that our allies are now moving on or working around us to achieve their goals, and our adversaries seek to weaken us by exploiting our institutions.
Kim Richard Nossal accurately summed up soft power in 1998 by saying “it… encourages the view that we can do foreign policy on the cheap,” but when we are “confronted by those who damage Canadian interests in a narrower sense… in such circumstances, a squishy notion such as soft power is next to useless.” Time to cast off that whimsical concept and forge a new approach in this increasingly volatile world around us.”
— RJKWells
“We need to increase our defense spending to at least 2%, immediately. Given the timelines for acquisition of military equipment, those purchases should come on line just about the same time the Arctic waters completely thaw and we face the rude awakening that Russia is our neighbour, and they can reach us.”
— Bill
