Kanye West’s insufficient apology and the return of gold stars: Roundup

The letter gestures at harm done to Jews, but it lingers far longer on Mr. West’s inner turmoil. The suffering described in vivid detail is primarily his own; the apology is intimate, but the reckoning is narrow. Modern culture encourages this imbalance. We are trained to treat wrongdoing as a symptom, not a choice, and recovery as redemption. The result is a moral framework where personal healing quietly replaces responsibility to others. Mr. West ends his letter by asking for patience and understanding as he finds his way home. That is a reasonable request for a private individual, but for a man who sold swastika shirts and broadcast hatred from the centre of American culture, it is not enough. Forgiveness requires more than explanation—it requires a very long track record of change. The Maple and the return of gold stars The first time Jews were forced to wear a gold star, in the late 1930s, it was justified as a bureaucratic measure. A clarification. A way of helping the public distinguish who was who. The language was administrative, not violent. The moral crime became obvious only later, when classification revealed its purpose. Yesterday marked Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It is meant to remind us not only of how mass murder ended, but of how it began: with paperwork, categorization, and the quiet normalization of exclusion. In a recent piece, The Maple, a Canadian left-wing publication, published a list of journalists who have taken sponsored trips to Israel. These journalists are not accused of factual errors or challenged on reporting. They are simply marked, named, and rendered suspect for the crime of experiencing the state of Israel first-hand. This effort does not exist in isolation. It sits comfortably alongside a parallel project pushed by the same publication, aimed at identifying and targeting Israeli citizens based on military service, a category that, in a country with mandatory conscription, is functionally synonymous with citizenship itself. Terrifyingly, this project has been taken up by candidates for the leadership of the federal New Democrats. The logic is not subtle. We are told, as always, that this has nothing to do with Jews. It is merely opposition to Zionism. Merely concern about bias—a political critique. But distinctions without moral difference deserve to be shattered.1In a recent conversation, Jesse Brown and Adam Louis Klein arrived at a conclusion that many prefer to avoid. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism may be semantically distinct, but functionally intertwined. They are merely different expressions of the same ancient hatred. When Jews are uniquely singled out for collective suspicion, when their national existence is treated as uniquely illegitimate, when mere association with their homeland is treated as moral contamination, the distinction collapses. The target remains the same. Only the vocabulary changes. To paraphrase one of the most famous dissents in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, some arguments come hidden like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but this wolf comes as a wolf.  It demands that a particular nation and a particular nationality deserve suspicion, condemnation, and an identifying badge. The gold star began as a tool of identification, not extermination. The ledger always comes before the knock, but we should be under no illusion where the evil, authoritarian logic leads. Ryan Wedding and Canada’s crime problem The recent arrest of Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympian charged with international drug trafficking and murder, should be a wake-up call for Canadians. Not because an athlete fell from grace, but because the case exposes, once again, how Canada seems unable to confront serious organized crime on its own. Wedding’s arrest was the product of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation. Canadian authorities cooperated, but the case was built, driven, and ultimately executed by American law enforcement. The same is true for a series of arrests of a group of Canadians connected to his network last November. According to U.S. prosecutors, the alleged operation involved large-scale cocaine trafficking, cartel-linked supply chains, and orders for violence, including murder. This was a transnational, sophisticated, and deeply violent crime. These investigations were led south of the border, with Canadian territory, infrastructure, and participants woven through it. All of this is occurring at the same time as Canadians are getting their elbows up about cooperation and integration with the United States broadly. But without them, how exposed would we be to the vast criminal networks apparently operating in our country with free rein? Sadly, this is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. As Ron Chhinzer noted recently on Hub Hits, some of the fastest-growing forms of crime in Canada are extortion, fraud, and organized intimidation. These crimes depend on networks, capital, and a clear-eyed assessment of enforcement risk. Criminals adapt quickly to jurisdictions where the odds of serious consequences are low. Canada talks often about crime, but it rarely dismantles sophisticated criminal enterprises on its own. When those cases do break open, they almost always do so with American leadership or cooperation. That arrangement has quietly become a vulnerability. The Wedding case is salacious and fascinating, but it is also primarily about a country that has grown accustomed to outsourcing the hardest parts of law enforcement, while assuming that help will always be there. Particularly in our current choppy geopolitical waters, that assumption deserves scrutiny.