The neighbour you thought you knew

It's written mainly for an American audience. It's mostly about what's become of the Jews in Trudeau's Canada, but its about all of us. Bonus: All glory to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham!?

Now I can let you in on what I’ve been up to.

This is a piece worth reading carefully. It is relevant not just to our many Canadian readers, but to anyone invested in the future of the West. . . This is one of the most important pieces we've run in 2024. What's happened to Jews under Justin Trudeau in Canada is shocking. Why did it happen? And how? Terry Glavin has the story. - Bari Weiss, The Free Press.

The headline sums it up: The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada. That’s what I’ve been up to.

A deeply reported and deeply disturbing look at the new reality for Jews in Canada. - Matti Friedman, former AP Jerusalem bureau reporter and editor, author of the Aleppo Codex.

If you’re going to read one thing today make it this. Incredible piece by my friend Terry Glavin on Canada’s antisemitism crisis. - Casey Babb, senior fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute and adviser to the Council for a Secure Canada.

Amazing long piece by Terry Glavin in the FP, gives a full picture of how Canada is becoming the most antisemitic western nation on earth. - Barbara Kay, columnist.

That's exactly what Terry Glavinstein would say. - Random dude on X. It's a puff piece by an Isreali shitpipe - Another one.

It wasn’t like this before Trudeau, and it won’t be like this after he’s gone. - Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

I’m not sure I’d bet on Poilievre’s response. Jew-hatred appears to be ineradicable, it’s become deeply and uniquely embedded in Canada, and the damage the Trudeau government has done won’t be easily undone.

Anyway, I provide these testimonial-type responses to the piece to give you an idea how the story is being received and what you’ll be getting yourself into when you get around to reading it. Here’s a conversation I had about the piece with Ben Mulroney on his radio show in Toronto this morning (cut me some slack, I was tired), right here.

It’s 6,266 words long, it required a hell of a lot of research, 17 in-depth interviews, lots of fact-checking. . . and it still doesn’t tell the whole story. A dear friend commented: Excellent summary. Funny guy.

I feel like I’ve been writing this story for about 20 years now, because I have, more or less. But then came October 7, 2023. Everything changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

I’ve been busy with The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada off and on since August. It’s the main thing that’s interrupted the usual routines here at The Real Story newsletter in ways that may have tested the patience of some of my more loyal subscribers. Now you know. Thanks for hanging in there.

On that subject, here’s an appeal to my free subscribers: This work is exhausting. I don’t like putting up paywalls, but my paying subscribers deserve deeper background and inside stories, which I reliably provide. And a paid sub allows full access to the archives, and the ability to tell me how wrong I am, in comments.

Journalism doesn’t come free. The Real Story is only $50 Canadian a year, so now’s your chance. Take the plunge. Just click right here.

Will the earth stop spinning so fast, please

Other projects have been taking up a lot of my time too, and it hasn’t helped that stories I’ve been covering for years and years are all converging and blowing up all at once, as in: A world of trouble that's been years in the making.

Of course it’s not just about antisemitism and its contemporary iteration, “anti-Zionism,” and it's not just about Israel. But the damage done is truly incalculable. One aspect of the sociopathology that I didn’t even address in the Free Press opus is the thing I was getting at here: The Palestinians' western 'friends' are the Palestinians' worst enemies.

It’s almost never acknowledged out loud. You can be utterly shattered and furious about the agonies endured by the people of Gaza since last October, but it’s become an almost impossible conversation to have, especially in all the spaces where it should be addressed honestly and compassionately.

That’s because you’ll be immediately overwhelmed by fanatics who feed on Palestinian suffering to fuel their lurid obsessions with wiping the State of Israel off the map and driving the Jews into the sea.

Enough on that subject for now.

No, things would not be better if Assad was still there

The big story right now is Syria, which of course is not just about Syria. It’s also personal. It’s one of those stories that haunt me in my sleep, which I’ll get into in a coming newsletter.

I have to say, I’m dismayed by how shallow the Anglosphere commentary has been (anti-Arab racism is a very real thing, by the way), as if the involvement of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria’s transitional government is the big thing to worry about. It isn’t.

It ’s because of that dismay that I brought a bit more attitude than usual to this piece, in yesterday’s National Post:

Who cares what Americans think about Syria?

Do read that piece carefully first if you intend to comment on it. I appreciate it when people get mad at me for things I actually write, rather than for what they imagine I think. Here’s some more attitude, just for fun.

After having sucked up to Assad all this time, almost all the Arab states want to be besties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham warlord Ahmed al-Sharaa all of a sudden. Even Hamas, whose main patrons were Bashar Assad and Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Sharaa’s worst enemies. Hamas is now saying friendly things to the Syrians who overthrew their pal Bashar.

U.S. President Joe Biden was prepared to offer Assad sanctions relief only three weeks ago, in exchange for unmooring his macabre Khomeinist satrapy, just the tiniest bit.

If the Americans want to expunge their shame, here’s how. End the U.S. sanctions on Syria, right away. They were intended to target Assad. He’s history.

It’s well known that HTS boss Sharaa got caught up in the anti-American jihad in Iraq when he was barely out of his teens, and he cycled through ISIS, al-Qaida, Jabhat al Nusra and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham before growing into his professed pluralistic standpoints. Nobody knows what he genuinely intends, but all the evidence so far (and the evidence to the contrary so far is almost entirely hysterical stuff and outright lies from Musk’s X bullsh*t machine) is that the Sunni HTS crowd is being sufficiently solicitous of the Christians and the Shia sects and the Druze, and whatever they say about sharia, they have explicitly pledged to leave women alone.

My Post piece describes as succinctly as I was able in the space of a single column how Syria’s pro-democracy revolutionaries were betrayed by Barack Obama back when it mattered the most. And now Donald Trump is the president-elect, whose views on foreign policy appear to consist mainly in a disinterest in even having one.

That’s fine. Fair enough. But it’s quite a stretch for any of us to have hurt feelings about a former Al Qaida affiliate getting all the glory in overthrowning the most blood-soaked dictatorship of the past half century. All these years, the Syrian people have been crying out for our help.

We preferred to avert our gaze, put on our Code Pink t-shirts or our MAGA hats, whichever suits our fashion, and congratulate ourselves on how clever we were to abstain from "forever wars." So now, it's HTS that gets the glory. Well, what would you expect?

If you really want something to worry about, worry about Turkey’s neo-Ottoman wannabee caliph Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his triangulations in Syria. He would like nothing better than to direct his proxy forces to extinguish the American-backed Kurdish sovereignty in Rojava.

He’s already pushing it, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces hasn’t been exactly helping matters. Over the past two weeks. Turkey’s Syrian National Army seized the Kurdish town of Tel Rifaat, near the Turkish border, then roared into Manbij, which had been controlled by the U.S.-backed SDF.

The SDF is Kurdish-led, but comprised mostly of Syrian Arab fighters whose loyalties have become rather fluid over the past few days. Mutiny is in the air. It’s really hard to get a handle on the state of play at the moment but the Kurds can at least rely on the backing of about 900 U.S. soldiers garrisoned in the northeast from the days of the international anti-ISIS coalition.

The Kurds also have friends in Marco Rubio, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, and also Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser. So that’s all to the good. But whether Trump will be nice to Erdogan and allow Turkey to thrash the daylights of Syria’s Kurds is a very live question.

Enough for now. More to come on all this in a coming newsletter.