Scenes from a long hot summer:

In Jerusalem, a decorated Brigadier-General, Amir Haskel, is pounced on by Israeli police and, with two colleagues, is told he has to sign an agreement to stay out of the capital for 15 days. The crime? Participating in an anti-Netanyahu demonstration outside the Prime Ministers official residence on Saturday night.

Fortunately for what remains of the tattered shreds of Israeli democracy, Jerusalem magistrates court Judge Orna Sandler-Etan rules that banning Haskel and the other two men from the capital would amount to a ban on free speech, and orders the three to be released without conditions.

In Europe, a letter signed by more than 1,000 parliamentarians, including senior Conservative figures in Britain, denounces Netanyahus controversial plans for annexation of parts of the West Bank and calls on European leaders to act decisively.

In London, Labours Sir Keir Starmer is praised by centrist Jewish groups after he fires Continuity Corbyn aka Shadow Education Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey for her enthusiastic endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, voiced by the left-wing actress Maxine Peake. Peake asserted and then withdrew the assertion that American police, not least those involved in the death of George Floyd, had learned the knee on the neck technique from Israeli secret services. The fact that American police were quite racist enough on their own account appears to have by-passed Peake and Long-Bailey entirely.

A Guardian report of a Labour attack on annexation led by Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy, whom assiduous readers will recall was endorsed by the Jewish Labour Movement in the race for Labour leadership is misleadingly accompanied by a demonstration picture with a huge banner saying Annexation equals Apartheid. Its only when you look closely that it is clear that this picture was actually taken of demonstrators in Tel Aviv, and that Lisa Nandy is nowhere in the picture, and, as far as I know, has not so far taken part in any demonstration against annexation.

Its also worth pointing out that the Guardian report says Nandys attack on annexation is backed by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. I have no idea if that is true, but there is more to come.

On Friday, in the wake of Long-Baileys departure, a group of left-wing MPs, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn remember him? complain to Starmer about Long-Baileys sacking by raging about annexation. Corbyn, now back in his comfort zone as a back-bench gadfly obsessed with Israel, takes part in a Labour Assembly event in solidarity with Palestine , and signs the now regulation ranty letter with a whole slew of the usual suspects. They include, if your capacity for surprise has not totally left you by now, Unite union general secretary Len McCluskey, he of the antisemitism mood music, and, colour me astonished Maxine Peake.

Meanwhile Corbyn, now free to say everything he could not while Labour leader, takes the opportunity to speak of the incredibly rude Israelis he encountered while on an undated visit from Jericho to Jerusalem. Once through the checkpoints, of course, there were a lot of very nice Palestinian people being very kind to us on the way.

If we have learned any lessons so far, the main one will be that everything is our fault. For myself and I loathe the idea of annexation I have an overwhelming urge to shunt Peake and Corbyn off to Jerusalem to be dealt with by the Israeli police.

Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist.

Read more here:

From the Middle East to Minnesota, everything is our fault - Jewish News

To exorcise my worst fears about the coming decade, I chose to write a bleak chronicle of it. If, by December 2030, developments have invalidated it, I hope such dreary prognoses will have played a part by spurring us to appropriate action.

Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game. Political parties behaved like sports teams having good or bad days, scoring points that propelled them up a league table that, at seasons end, determined who would form a government and then do next to nothing.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic stripped away the veneer of indifference to reveal the political reality: some people do have the power to tell the rest of us what to do. Lenins description of politics as who does what to whom seemed more apt than ever.

By June 2020, as lockdowns began to ease, left-wing optimism that the pandemic would revive state power on behalf of the powerless remained, leading friends to fantasize about a renaissance of the commons and a capacious definition of public goods. Margaret Thatcher, I would remind them, left the British state larger, more powerful, and more concentrated than she had found it. An authoritarian state was necessary to support markets controlled by corporations and banks. Those in authority have never hesitated to harness massive government intervention to the preservation of oligarchic power. Why should a pandemic change that?

As a result of COVID-19, the grim reaper almost claimed both the British prime minister and the Prince of Wales, and even Hollywoods nicest star. But it was the poorer and the browner that the reaper actually did claim. They were easy pickings.

Its not hard to understand why. Disempowerment breeds poverty, which ages people faster and, ultimately, readies them for the cull. In the shadow of falling prices, wages, and interest rates, it was never likely that the spirit of solidarity, which soothed our souls during lockdowns, would translate into the use of state power to strengthen the weak and vulnerable.

On the contrary, it was megafirms and the ultra-rich that were grateful socialism was alive and well. Fearing that the masses, condemned to the savage arena of unfettered markets amid a public-health disaster, would no longer be able to afford to buy their products, they reallocated their spending to shares, yachts, and mansions. Thanks to the freshly printed money central banks pumped into them via the usual financiers, stock markets flourished as economies collapsed. Wall Street bankers assuaged their guilt, lingering since 2008, by letting middle-class customers fight over the scraps.

Plans for the green transition, which young climate activists had put on the agenda before 2020, were given only lip service as governments buckled under towering mountains of debt. Precautionary saving by the many reinforced the economic depression, yielding industrial-scale discontent on a browning planet.

The disconnect between the financial world and the real world, in which billions struggled, inevitably widened. And with it grew the discontent that gave rise to the political monsters I was warning my left-leaning friends about.

As in the 1930s, in the souls of many, the grapes of wrath were growing heavy for a new, bitter vintage. In place of the 1930s soapboxes from which demagogues promised to restore dignity to the disgruntled masses, Big Tech provided apps and social networks perfectly suited for the task.

Once communities surrendered to the fear of infection, human rights seemed an unaffordable luxury. Big Tech developed biometric bracelets to monitor our vital data around the clock. In cahoots with governments, they combined the output with geolocation data, fed it all into algorithms, and ensured that the population received helpful text messages informing them what to do or where to go to stop new outbreaks in their tracks.

But a system that monitors our coughs could also monitor our laughs. It could know how our blood pressure responds to the leaders speech, to the bosss pep talk, to the police announcement banning a demonstration. The KGB and Cambridge Analytica suddenly seemed Neolithic.

With state power re-legitimized by the pandemic, cynical agitators took advantage. Instead of strengthening voices calling for international cooperation, China and the United States bolstered nationalism. Elsewhere, too, nationalist leaders stoked xenophobia and offered demoralized citizens a simple trade: personal pride and national greatness in exchange for authoritarian powers to protect them from lethal viruses, cunning foreigners, and scheming dissidents.

Just as cathedrals were the Middle Ages architectural legacy, the 2020s left us tall walls, electrified fences, and flocks of surveillance drones. The nation-states revival made the world less open, less prosperous, and less free precisely for those who had always found it hard to travel, to make ends meet, and to speak their minds. For the oligarchs and functionaries of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and other megafirms, who got on famously with the strongmen in authority, globalization proceeded apace.

The myth of the global village gave way to an equilibrium between great-power blocs, each sporting burgeoning militaries, separate supply chains, idiosyncratic autocracies, and class divisions reinforced by new forms of nativism. The new socioeconomic cleavages threw the prevailing features of each countrys politics into sharp relief. Like people who become caricatures of themselves in a crisis, whole countries focused on their collective illusions, exaggerating and cementing pre-existing prejudices.

The great strength of the new fascists during the twenties was that, unlike their political forebears, they did not even have to enter government to gain power. Liberal and social-democratic parties began to fall over one another to embrace xenophobia-lite, then authoritarianism-lite, then totalitarianism-lite.

So, here we are, at the end of the decade. Where are we?

Excerpt from:

A Lost Decade: Where the trajectory of today will take us by 2030 if we fail to alter course - Milwaukee Independent

BE PROUD CANADA

Never before have I wanted to embrace the Canadian flag more than I do today, a special pride, that puffed up feeling about ones country, on Canada Day. Sometimes the shadow cast over us, by the American eagle, causes me to ask, What is the significance of our nation? A question that will take me to the past. Canada has often been taken for granted, looking for no accolades from other nations, but has fought with allies during two World Wars, Korea, Afghanistan and other occasions. We gave our support and comfort to passengers of planes diverted on 9/11 to Newfoundland, while Canadian volunteers help nations with wildlife conservation, and so much more. Im proud to say our politicians have shown their grit fighting this COVID-19 pandemic, having listened to medical professionals regarding this virus. This is one of our nations finest hours, the world seeing the character of our people, fighting against this virus, as our flag sways gently over Parliament building steeples. Our red and white striped flag, with its red maple leaf symbolizing pride and strength, made of 100% nylon, has also flown over many international peacekeeping locations, such as Kosovo, Timor, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Croatia, Bosnia, where 125,000 Canadians over six decades have served in over 35 nations for UN and NATO peacekeeping missions. Ive definitely answered my own question, we certainly are a significant nation!

Peter J. Middlemore Sr.Windsor

(Far too often we feel diminished under the shadow of our American neighbors, but what you have written here is an excellent reminder of just how much of a giant of a country we are and we should be proud)

CORRECT SPEAK

Has it occurred to your readers that we are no longer able to think, speak or act differently from the dictated and accepted ideology of the day. This censorship is painted under the guise of improved human relations, but it foreshadows an authoritarian government where the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not recognized. That document states that: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Betty L. ReadeOakville

(Freedom of speech and the freedom to have a dissenting opinion are under fire. Say nothing so no one is offended seems to be the order of the day. This is a troubling notion)

FUREY FACTOR

Re If Canada does a prisoner exchange (Anthony Furey, June 26): I couldnt believe Anthony was endorsing a prisoner exchange with China. Give in to the bully, not Canada! Then I read on. Pull up the drawbridge, suggesting when the Michaels are back on Canadian soil, announce the banning of Huawei, then implement measures to prevent the Chinese government from purchasing Canadian firms and to withdraw our membership from the IMF. Brilliant. Anthony for PM!

Glenn SilverWoodbridge

(Its a nuanced argument, but one worth exploring)

KUDOS TO CARTER

Vince Carter has made an indelible impact on the NBA with his remarkable skill and enduring commitment. I congratulate him on a storied career, and I thank him for being a true ambassador of the game.

Paul BaconHallandale Beach, Fla.

(We share your sentiment. Carter was a star and always a great ambassador for the sport)

More:

Letters to the Editor, June 27 - Toronto Sun