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Every civilization eventually reaches the point where words stop describing reality and start serving politics.

The first casualty is precision.

The second is truth.

No word illustrates this collapse better than genocide.

Before discussing Gaza, before debating casualty figures, before arguing over proportionality, there is an intellectually prior question that every serious person must answer.

That question is almost never asked.

Instead, the accusation is simply asserted, repeated, hashtagged, and treated as though repetition were evidence.

Yet genocide is not a slogan.

It is perhaps the gravest accusation recognized in international law.

The Genocide Convention was drafted in the shadow of the Holocaust to describe something extraordinarily specific: the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. The distinguishing feature is not merely death, suffering, or destruction. It is specific intent to destroy the group itself.

That demanding standard is precisely what gives the word its moral authority.

Remove the requirement of intent, and genocide ceases to be a legal concept. It becomes a political adjective.

Today, however, the word is increasingly stretched far beyond its original meaning. People invoke it in contexts involving structural injustice, cultural destruction, historical grievance, or devastating wars. People are free to argue for broader philosophical definitions if they wish. But they are not free to quietly substitute those broader definitions for the legal one while pretending nothing has changed.

That is not reasoning.

It is changing the rules of the game after it has begun.

And once words become infinitely elastic, evidence becomes optional.

Which brings us to Israel.

Adjusted for population, the attack was roughly equivalent to 40,000 Americans being murdered in a single morning.

Imagine, for a moment, that the victims had not been Israelis.

Imagine that armed Canadian militias crossed into Michigan, massacred forty thousand Americans, abducted hundreds more, and retreated into southern Ontario under the protection of a government that promised to repeat the attack “again and again.”

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Nuance is an unfashionable commodity in the argument over Israel, perhaps because it interferes with the pleasurable business of choosing saints and villains.

Today, Canada, France and Britain joined a coordinated move toward restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank; Britain went further, announcing an import ban and a broader sanctions regime. Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and Ed Miliband would like this understood as the application of international law and moral principle.

Perhaps some of it is.

That is the argument here. Not that Israel is blameless. Not that the settlements are beyond criticism. Not that Palestinians have imaginary grievances. And certainly not that the present Israeli government has behaved wisely. It is possible—although modern politics increasingly treats this as a neurological disorder—to hold two thoughts simultaneously: Israel can deserve criticism, and its critics can still be selective, legally imprecise, politically opportunistic and wrong.

Let us therefore concede what ought to be conceded.

But notice what disappears almost immediately from the Western telling of the story: Israelis.

They become scenery.

They have not.

An INSS national-security survey in January found that 55 percent of Israelis believed the security establishment was being too lenient toward Jewish nationalist crime in Judea and Samaria.

Among Jewish Israelis the figure was 48 percent. Even among voters for the governing coalition, one third said enforcement was too lenient. That is not a population united behind settler violence. It is a country arguing bitterly with itself about it—which, inconveniently, is what democracies do.

One can condemn the Israeli government without pretending that its most objectionable coalition partners are a representative sample of Israeli moral opinion.

Today’s joint statement by Canada, France, Britain and their partners describes the settlements straightforwardly as “illegal under international law.”

Miliband went further and announced that Britain now officially considers the Israeli occupation itself unlawful. The foundation for that position is formidable. The International Court of Justice concluded in its 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful, and the prevailing international interpretation regards settlement activity as violating the Fourth Geneva Convention.

That is the dominant legal view.

That is not, however, the same as saying there is no legal argument on the other side.

This is where Natasha Hausdorff becomes interesting.

Hausdorff therefore asks a question that almost disappears from ordinary discussion of the West Bank:

What were Israel’s legal borders when the British Mandate ended?

The familiar story jumps quickly from the UN partition proposal of 1947 to the Green Line and then to 1967. Hausdorff says international law does not permit such casual jumps.

The 1947 UN partition resolution was a General Assembly recommendation. It proposed a Jewish and an Arab state, but it was rejected by the Arab side, war followed, and the proposed boundaries never became a mutually implemented sovereign border settlement. Hausdorff therefore argues that Resolution 181 cannot simply displace the ordinary default rule governing the territorial boundaries inherited when the Mandate ended.

Then came the 1949 armistice lines—the famous Green Line.

But an armistice line is not necessarily a sovereign border. Indeed, the agreements deliberately avoided finally adjudicating territorial sovereignty.

Jordan subsequently controlled the West Bank and annexed it in 1950. That annexation received almost no international recognition.

Her argument is more radical than the usual Israeli talking point that “the territory is disputed.”

She says the proper legal starting point is the boundary of the former British Mandate west of the Jordan, because uti possidetis juris ordinarily supplies the territorial baseline when a state emerges.

If respectable international lawyers and dissenting judges can articulate a contrary argument based upon a recognized doctrine of customary international law, then politicians should have the modesty to acknowledge that there is a legal argument rather than presenting three words—“illegal under international law”—as though they had been found engraved on a tablet beneath Mount Sinai and God Himself had pronounced it on Tuesday morning.

And Oslo complicates the morality play even further.

The Oslo agreements divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C. Palestinian authorities acquired extensive governing authority in Areas A and B; Israel retained control in Area C pending negotiations over final status. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary.

Thirty years later, “temporary” has become one of the Middle East’s more ambitious euphemisms.

But the important legal-historical point remains: final sovereignty and borders were left to negotiation.

Hausdorff emphasized this distinction precisely before Parliament. An eventual agreement can change the territorial position. Her point is that no final negotiated agreement has done so.

That does not give Israel carte blanche.

Then comes Miliband’s most explosive accusation.

Today, standing in the House of Commons, the British Foreign Secretary declared that there is “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank—perpetrated by settler terrorists.”

Those words deserve to be read carefully because their gravity is immense.

Miliband cited 65 Palestinian communities he says have been completely displaced since 2023, affecting more than 4,000 people. He cited settler attacks, destruction and intimidation. He quoted former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and former minister and IDF brigadier general Ephraim Sneh, both of whom have themselves used the terminology of ethnic cleansing. He then adopted that allegation as the British government's position.

That is considerably more serious than saying that settler violence exists.

The UN formulation Miliband himself quoted describes ethnic cleansing as a purposeful policy by one ethnic or religious group to remove another civilian population from particular territory through violence or terror.

There are therefore at least two separate propositions here.

The first is well evidenced: violent settlers have attacked Palestinians, and some Palestinian communities have fled or been displaced.

The second is much larger: that these episodes collectively establish the purposeful policy required to characterize what is occurring as ethnic cleansing.

The evidence he gives may support investigating that charge. It does not make the characterization self-proving.

And this distinction matters enormously. Criminal extremists intimidating Palestinians from particular villages should be prosecuted relentlessly. Israeli officials who knowingly facilitate such displacement should be held accountable. But moving from those propositions to the morally radioactive phrase ethnic cleansing requires evidence of purpose, scope and policy commensurate with the accusation.

Otherwise the term stops describing evidence and begins organizing it.

There is an additional absurdity in allowing the extremists to stand in for the country itself. Again, while Miliband tells Parliament about “ethnic cleansing,” nearly half of Jewish Israelis tell pollsters their own authorities are not being tough enough on Jewish nationalist crime.

Those facts can coexist.

Indeed, that is precisely the point.

Nuance permits them to.

Propaganda does not.

Now consider the sanctions themselves.

If the governing principle is that states whose citizens or governments facilitate violent displacement in disputed or occupied territory should face targeted economic consequences, then that may be an excellent principle.

Apply it.

Consistently.

Western governments certainly criticize and sometimes sanction these countries.

But what Israel appears uniquely capable of inspiring is something more exquisitely tailored.

Special rules for settlement goods. Special prohibitions on services. Special restrictions on financing. Special prohibitions involving real estate and construction. Special treatment of advertisements. Special parliamentary declarations about the legality of territory.

And now an official British pronouncement of ethnic cleansing.

Hausdorff has made precisely this broader complaint: customary international law cannot be universal except when its application becomes politically inconvenient. If uti possidetis helps establish the boundaries of states emerging from colonial and federal administrative units elsewhere, then one must explain—not merely assert—why Israel is different.

And then there is politics.

This is the section in which certainty should diminish rather than increase.

Nobody can climb inside Mark Carney’s, Emmanuel Macron’s or Ed Miliband’s skull to establish whether principle or polling occupies the larger chamber. But uncertainty about the contents need not oblige us to furnish the place with virtues.

Miliband deserves a more discriminating judgment. But granting him sincerity does not deny the Labour Party's political reality. Gaza has become an important electoral issue on the British left. Labour faces pressure from Greens and independents in constituencies where anger over Gaza matters significantly; even today’s reporting on the Holborn and St Pancras contest identifies Gaza as one of the issues helping the Greens challenge Labour.

Governments know where their political vulnerabilities lie.

In Britain, YouGov found that 41% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons named Gaza/Israel among the top issues determining their 2024 vote, compared with just 5% of voters overall; in heavily Muslim constituencies Labour’s vote fell dramatically, and explicitly pro-Gaza independents won several seats. The Greens have benefited from that shift even though their domestic social platform includes policies such as legal gender self-identification for trans and non-binary people, an agenda that cannot simply be assumed to reflect the views of socially conservative Muslim voters.

The more plausible conclusion is not that Muslim voters suddenly embraced the entire Green manifesto, but that for a significant bloc Gaza is salient enough to outweigh disagreement on other issues.

Canada shows the same basic electoral logic, though the polling is thinner. A 2025 survey by the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council found 75% of respondents saying Palestine and foreign policy were the most important issues determining their vote, and 86% judging Ottawa’s response to Gaza completely inadequate.

The political importance is greater than the raw national Muslim population share suggests because Muslim Canadians are concentrated in parts of the GTA and other urban battlegrounds. A vote moved in a safe Alberta Conservative seat or a safe downtown-Toronto Liberal seat changes little; a similarly sized bloc in a marginal Mississauga or suburban Toronto riding can change who forms government. So parties need not believe Muslim voters endorse their entire progressive program.

Indeed, politics very often consists of finding principles whose application happens not to injure you.

And this returns us to the curious restoration of Western eyesight whenever Israel appears.

Toward Turkey, complexity intrudes.

Toward China, commercial realities appear.

Toward Saudi Arabia, strategic necessity enters the room.

Governments begin explaining that diplomacy requires engagement, that change occurs slowly, that geopolitical relationships are complicated and that screaming denunciations from the dispatch box are not always productive.

All perfectly reasonable.

And this is why the objection to today’s policy should not be caricatured as “Israel can do no wrong.”

Israel can do wrong. Its government can do wrong. Its settlers can commit crimes. Its policies can deserve condemnation.

Those propositions are almost banal.

The interesting questions begin after them.

Is a contested proposition being presented as uncontested law?

Are extremist settlers being permitted to define millions of Israelis who themselves want tougher enforcement against those extremists?

Has evidence of violent localized displacement justified the extraordinary governmental conclusion of ethnic cleansing, or has the conclusion outrun the evidence presented for it?

Are equivalent principles applied with equivalent enthusiasm elsewhere?

And how remarkable is it that this particular outbreak of Western moral courage arrives in a political environment in which condemning Israel is increasingly inexpensive—and, in some constituencies, positively remunerative?

Those questions do not absolve Israel.

For Israel, Western governments discover law without ambiguity, morality without hesitation and punishment without delay.

Elsewhere they rediscover nuance.

Perhaps Israel does deserve a microscope.

But anyone claiming to act in the name of universal principles has one elementary obligation: occasionally point the microscope somewhere else.

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The Canadian government appears to have become emotionally inconsolable over the plight of a small flotilla of Western activists sailing toward Gaza in what was essentially a piece of narcissistic political theatre wrapped in the language of humanitarian martyrdom. Ministers spoke as though the passengers had stormed Normandy rather than boarded a float…

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OTTAWA – Prime Minister Carney today welcomed the latest round of threats, memes, tariffs, and insults from Trump, describing them as “an extraordinary, wonderful, inexhaustible political resource.”

“He got me elected,” the Prime Minister said, “and somehow he just keeps giving. Every tariff threat, every name change, every insult, every idiotic statement — it’s another opportunity to explain that whatever is going wrong is his fault. It’s beautiful.”

Carney paused.

“I love him,” he said. “I mean, I really love him.”

The room went quiet.

The Prime Minister smiled. “Loaves and fishes. Tariffs. Same basic concept.”

Carney said he remains “very excited” about the possibility of further economic weakness.

“A recession may be difficult for Canadians, but who cares?” Carney said. “But for me? Tremendous upside; if unemployment reaches eight percent, people get nervous. At nine percent, they really hate him. At ten percent, I become Churchill.”

“Okay, it’s not great poetry. I’m an economist, leave me alone.”

Standing beside him was Linda McAllister, a 75-year-old constituent who had been slowly working through a box of tissues, weeping at being in the Prime Minister’s presence.

“Linda, write that down,” Carney said, leaning toward her. She put it on a sign.

Asked whether growing food bank lines were a concern while Canadians remain focused on Washington, Carney said it would only help his approval numbers. “Seventy percent seems entirely achievable. Eighty would be encouraging. At ninety percent, I think we start talking about statues.”

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Viruses seek entry. Bacteria probe for weakness. Mutated cells emerge. Foreign proteins circulate through the bloodstream. Yet most of us notice none of it because an extraordinary biological system works quietly and continuously for us. Health is not the absence of pathogens. Pathogens are everywhere. Health is the presence of an immune system that can recognize what belongs to the body and what threatens it.

Civilizations require precisely the same capacities.

The transition works best by deepening the metaphor: the danger is not merely that pathogens exist, but that a civilization may become incapable of recognizing them because it has trained itself to regard every diagnosis as prejudice.

Every society lives amid pathogens: lies, fanaticism, tribalism, conspiracy theories, propaganda, political demagoguery, and ideologies that sanctify cruelty. These are not inventions of the digital age. They are permanent features of human nature.

We have cultivated the consoling fiction that beneath every cultural difference lies essentially the same liberal-democratic aspiration. We imagine that unfamiliar customs, doctrines, and political traditions are merely a thin patina of awkwardness or surliness covering people who, at heart, already share the assumptions of the post-Enlightenment West.

But they are not universal convictions. They are historically unusual achievements.

Cultures are not decorative variations upon a common liberal foundation. They contain moral systems, religious doctrines, political assumptions, loyalties, taboos, hierarchies, and conceptions of justice that may differ profoundly. Some of those values are compatible with Western liberal democracy. Others are indifferent to it. Some are openly hostile to it.

To acknowledge this is not racism. It is not an assertion of biological superiority. It is the elementary recognition that ideas differ, that cultures transmit ideas, and that some ideas are more compatible with human freedom than others.

Yet cultural relativism has made even this modest observation appear morally suspect. We have been taught that judging another culture is inherently arrogant, that differences are mostly superficial, and that any attempt to distinguish between liberal and illiberal values is merely prejudice disguised as analysis. As a result, we often refuse to name fanaticism when it appears, excuse authoritarian beliefs as cultural authenticity, and treat hostility toward Western freedoms as simply another equally valid way of arranging society.

We tell ourselves that this refusal is kindness. We call it empathy, tolerance, openness, and inclusion. But frequently it is something less admirable. It is cowardice: the fear of being called racist, xenophobic, intolerant, or culturally insensitive. That fear becomes so crippling that we deny what is plainly before us. We stop examining ideas by their content and instead judge criticism by the identity of the person being criticized.

This does not mean immigrants are pathogens, foreign cultures are diseases, or Western civilization is pure. The biological metaphor applies to destructive ideas, not to races or peoples. Western societies have generated their own fanaticisms, lies, conspiracies, hatreds, and totalitarian movements. No civilization is naturally immune from moral corruption. The point is that a healthy society must examine every ideology—including its own—with honesty and moral confidence.

A functioning immune system does not hate the body it protects. Nor does it condemn every unfamiliar organism as dangerous. It distinguishes. It identifies. It responds proportionately. But it cannot protect anything if it has been taught that discrimination itself—the act of distinguishing one thing from another—is immoral.

The question, then, is not only whether the pathogens exist.

The question is whether the civilization can still recognize them, name them, and resist them without collapsing into shame at the very act of judgment.

This essay is not primarily about Israel. Nor is it an attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It begins with one proposition accepted across the mainstream historical record: Hamas and associated armed groups crossed into Israel on October 7, 2023, murdered approximately 1,200 people, abducted 251 hostages, and committed documented atrocities, including sexual violence. One may debate military strategy, humanitarian law, proportionality, or the conduct of the war that followed. Those are legitimate subjects of argument.

The metaphor now makes a crucial clarification: the “pathogens” are destructive ideas and ideologies, not immigrants, ethnic groups, or cultures treated as biological entities.

The subject here is different.

It is the reaction.

Like physicians, we often learn more from the body’s response to infection than from the pathogen itself.

October 7 became an immunological test of liberal democracy.

Can it identify the pathogen?

One might have expected the answer to be obvious. Instead, almost immediately, the massacre was denied, minimized, justified or transformed into someone else’s crime. Documented atrocities became “contested narratives.” Hostages disappeared beneath ideological abstractions. The moral vocabulary itself seemed to dissolve.

Recognition had begun to fail.

The digital world did not invent this failure, but it accelerated it dramatically. Father Charles Coughlin spread antisemitic conspiracy theories through radio nearly a century ago. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion travelled internationally without algorithms. Human beings have always had a remarkable talent for believing falsehoods that flirt with and procreate our bias.

What has changed is how efficiently they spread.

Modern digital platforms reward outrage, repetition and tribal affirmation. They learn what captures attention and amplify it. They do not create every prejudice, but they can reinforce existing ones with extraordinary speed. Falsehoods no longer require years to circulate. They require minutes.

A pathogen that once spread village by village now travels globally before breakfast.

Recognition becomes more difficult when the infection arrives carrying a million identical voices.

Recognition without response is biologically useless.

Here, too, the reaction proved revealing.

Universities, media organizations, professional bodies and other institutions often appeared uncertain whether they could condemn the massacre without first surrounding the condemnation with qualifications, explanations or political calculations. The ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ heuristic transformed enemies of Trump into friends, and that model of thinking created friends in Iran and turned a blind eye to barbarism.

A healthy immune response distinguishes between recognizing an infection and debating the best long-term treatment. One can argue vigorously about military policy while still recognizing an atrocity as an atrocity.

When the immune response hesitates because the pathogen has become politically fashionable, the infection gains ground.

One of biology’s great achievements is that the immune system remembers previous encounters. It does not begin every battle from ignorance.

Civilizations require the same capacity.

The evidence of this amnesia is not anecdotal. A 2020 Claims Conference survey of American Millennials and members of Generation Z found that 63 percent did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, 36 percent believed that two million or fewer had been killed, and 48 percent could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.

Eleven percent said they believed that Jews themselves had caused the Holocaust. The survey did not find that an entire generation denied the Holocaust outright. Its findings were, in a sense, more revealing: enormous numbers possessed so little reliable knowledge that distortion, inversion, and conspiracy could enter the space where historical memory should have been.

Canada cannot regard this as an exclusively American failure. In a Claims Conference and Azrieli Foundation survey of Canadian adults, 62 percent of Millennials did not know that six million Jews had been murdered, 52 percent could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto, and 22 percent had either not heard of the Holocaust or were unsure whether they had heard of it. Among Canadians of all ages, 54 percent did not know the number of Jewish victims, while almost half could not name a single camp or ghetto.

These numbers matter because historical memory is not ornamental knowledge. It is part of a civilization’s immune system. A society that does not remember how antisemitic propaganda developed, how conspiracy theories became political doctrine, how respectable institutions normalized exclusion, or how dehumanizing language prepared the ground for violence will not necessarily recognize those processes when they return in altered form. It may hear an ancient accusation and mistake it for a fresh insight. It may encounter propaganda with a modern vocabulary and fail to recognize the older structure underneath it.

The same weakness appears in public understanding of October 7. The barbarity of the Oct. 7 massacre has been verified by research; indeed, the Hamas attackers and those who joined in made no effort to hide it. Families were burned alive, 19 children slaughtered, teenagers violated, and further barbarisms; but in a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, only 58 percent of Americans under thirty said the manner in which Hamas carried out the October 7 attack was unacceptable, compared with 86 percent of those aged sixty-five and older. Among the under-thirty group, 34 percent said Hamas’s reasons for fighting Israel were valid, while 35 percent said they were unsure.

People increasingly hold strong opinions without the chronology needed to test them. They know the slogans, the images, and the emotional vocabulary, but not always what happened first, what followed, who made which decision, or which claims have been independently established.

A civilization that forgets its previous epidemics mistakes old diseases for new discoveries. It may even welcome them as progress.

The digital age has not simply accelerated information. It has accelerated amnesia. Every generation increasingly behaves as though history began with the latest viral video. Events are severed from the decades that preceded them, images are stripped of provenance, and political judgments form before the most elementary facts are established. The result is not merely ignorance. It is a population left immunologically exposed: highly stimulated, morally certain, and historically defenceless.

A healthy immune system knows what not to attack.

An autoimmune disease is different. The immune system mistakes the body’s own healthy tissues for hostile invaders. The system designed to preserve life begins consuming the organism from within.

This may be the most illuminating analogy for parts of the contemporary West.

Free inquiry becomes “dangerous.” Due process becomes an inconvenience. Presumption of innocence becomes optional. Historical scholarship becomes suspect. Objective truth becomes merely another exercise of power. Universal moral principles give way to tribal loyalties. The absurd notion of Islamophobia and the idea that Islam cannot be criticized is an intellectual autoimmune disease that may end up costing Western civilization its existence.

No civilization survives indefinitely when it begins attacking the institutions and habits that once protected it.

This helps explain why October 7 became such an important diagnostic test.

The question is not whether every Palestinian shares the same beliefs. No honest observer could know the private convictions of millions of people living under authoritarian rule, amid war and fear. Nor should entire populations be reduced to a single moral category.

Cultures, however, are judged by their public norms.

When public celebrations accompany atrocities, when documented educational materials glorify violence or martyrdom, when hatred becomes honourable rather than shameful, and when moderation retreats into silence, one need not conclude that every individual is infected. A physician does not examine every cell before diagnosing the patient. He examines the symptoms.

Advanced disease makes pathology easier to recognize.

The purpose of observing it is not to condemn one patient but to understand how disease progresses.

The West has not reached that stage.

But it would be folly to assume that immune systems fail all at once.

Suppose, merely as a thought experiment, that the increase in antisemitic incidents recorded across parts of Europe and North America over the past two years were to continue for another decade. Perhaps it will not. Social trends rarely move in straight lines. They may accelerate, plateau or reverse.

But if they did continue, when would we stop describing the phenomenon as isolated? At what point would we conclude that something more fundamental had gone wrong—not merely in politics, but in the civilization’s capacity to recognize and resist one of history’s oldest pathogens?

That question is not really about Jews.

It is about the patient.

No physician celebrates a diagnosis. Diagnosis exists so that treatment remains possible.

The same is true of civilizations.

When recognition fails, infection spreads. When response weakens, pathogens flourish. When memory disappears, old diseases return. When tolerance collapses, the immune system begins attacking the healthy tissue upon which its own survival depends.

Biological death occurs when disease overwhelms the organism.

Civilizational death is quieter.

The buildings remain standing. Elections continue. Markets open. Universities grant degrees. Outwardly, everything appears normal.

But inwardly, the organism has forgotten what it exists to defend.

October 7 did not reveal a new pathogen. Hatred, propaganda, and fanaticism are ancient companions of mankind.

It revealed something more troubling.

Biology teaches a lesson that is neither sentimental nor ideological. When an immune system fails to identify and destroy genuine pathogens, disease spreads. When that same immune system begins attacking the healthy tissues it was designed to protect, the consequences are often even more devastating. The organism weakens, its vital functions deteriorate, and, if the process continues unchecked, sickness gives way to collapse and ultimately death.

Civilizations are no different. Their immune systems consist not of antibodies but of institutions, laws, cultural norms, historical memory, and the moral instincts that distinguish liberty from tyranny, truth from propaganda, and civilization from barbarism. When those defenses lose the ability to distinguish friend from foe—when they protect the destructive while condemning those attempting to preserve the society itself—they cease to function as an immune system at all.

The result is not always immediate collapse. Nations rarely disappear in a single dramatic moment. More often they continue to function outwardly while decaying inwardly. The institutions remain. The elections continue. The economy limps forward. Yet the culture increasingly serves the very forces eroding the principles upon which it was built.

Biology offers a remarkable phenomenon. Some pathogens do more than infect a host; they alter its behaviour in ways that advance the pathogen’s own survival.

Rabies, for example, invades the central nervous system, provoking aggression, excessive salivation, and biting—the very behaviours that increase its transmission to a new host.

Likewise, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii appears to reduce rodents’ instinctive fear of cats, making them more likely to be eaten and thereby allowing the parasite to complete its life cycle in its feline host.

In such cases, the pathogen is no longer merely living within the organism. It is, in important respects, redirecting the organism’s behaviour toward its own ends rather than those of the host.

Healthy civilizations possess intellectual immune systems that recognize dangerous ideas before those ideas become socially normative. But when that immune system is weakened, propaganda ceases merely to circulate within the culture. It begins to shape the culture’s instincts. The civilization still believes it is acting in its own interest, even as its institutions, moral vocabulary, and public discourse increasingly serve the propagation of ideas that are hostile to the civilization itself.

That is the danger confronting much of the Western world today.

The buildings may still stand. The flags may still fly. The constitutions may still exist on paper. But a civilization that no longer possesses the moral capacity to defend itself has already begun the long transition from a living society to something that merely imitates one.

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For nearly three years, a great many people have had a great deal to say about me.

What I said. What I meant. What happened. Why I was suspended. Why I was eventually fired. Whether this was really about Israel, antisemitism, academic freedom, misconduct — or something else entirely.

CANADALAND gave me the opportunity to sit down and answer those questions for myself.

And I did.

We talked about the post that started it all. We talked about Hamas and Israel. We talked about what happened inside the university after I said, publicly and unapologetically, that I stood with Israel. We talked about the allegations made against me, the investigation, the unions, my firing, and the extraordinary gap I believe exists between the public story and what the documentary record actually shows.

Some of the interview is uncomfortable.

Good.

This story should be uncomfortable.

Because whatever you think of me — and whatever you think of my politics — there is a much bigger question lurking underneath all of this:

What happens when an institution decides that the problem isn’t what you did, but what you believe?

Listen to the CANADALAND interview.

LINK TO CANADALAND STORY

Then decide for yourself.

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There was a time when the word apartheid had genuine moral gravity. It was not a slogan. It was not a cultish campus chant. It was not a rhetorical weapon to be swung at political opponents. It described something concrete, something measurable, and something profoundly evil: a legal system in which the state itself assigned different rights to …

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After every massacre offered up in the name of the Prophet, the same cheap mass is said. A minister appears. A community leader appears. A commentator appears who has never sat with the Hadith long enough to be embarrassed by it. They announce that the killers have nothing to do with Islam, that Islam is peace, that the real wound is Islamophobia.

We are told to keep our gaze fixed on the pristine tableau they have constructed: the morally pure cause, the spotless victim, the little hospital of mannequins. The surrounding junkyard of contraction, suffering and human ugliness is not to be looked at. To glance sideways is hearsay.

The corpses are treated as a branding error. The theory on offer is that a faith whose mainstream legal traditions still treat apostasy as a capital offence, blasphemy as an injury to be avenged, and unbelief as a civic disability is only accidentally adjacent to the men who take those traditions seriously.

This is not thought. It is a refusal to look. It is also a slight against those Muslims who have looked, and who discovered that looking can get you isolated, threatened, or worse.

Karl Popper’s point about the open society was never a hymn to niceness. It was a distinction: a society that can criticize its own foundations and let people leave them, against a society that treats criticism as contamination and exit as treason.

That standard is the Open Society Test. It is not a demand that anyone become an atheist. It demands that the closed system stop at the courthouse door.

Where are the Muslims willing to affirm the Open Society Test? I am waiting. Here are the eleven:

1. I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving Islam.

If this sentence cannot be spoken, the rest is furniture. A religion that claims the conscience in perpetuity, and treats departure as a crime against God and community, is not a private taste. It is a property claim on a mind. The major schools of classical jurisprudence did not stumble into this; they wrote it down.

A Western Muslim who will not disown the penalty has already ranked the codes. The right of exit is the first right of an open society. Without it, every other liberty is rented.

And here the religion of peace acquires its bodyguards. There is no honest census of the people who require permanent security for the crime of leaving, mocking, or even editing Islam, because most of them live without famous names and would prefer to keep breathing. But the public cases are not a rumour.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who announced her apostasy and then wrote as if women were not merely a theological footnote, has spent two decades moving under armed protection. After Theo van Gogh was shot and nearly beheaded on an Amsterdam street for the film they made together, a letter promising her the same end was pinned to his body with a knife. She was still walking into rooms with a guard in 2026, and the Dutch state once spent millions a year keeping her alive.

Salman Rushdie was not a convert in the pamphlet sense; he was born into a Muslim family and then wrote a novel. For that, a head of state issued a murder warrant in 1989, a bounty followed, and the open society discovered that a book could put a man into hiding for a decade under British protection.

The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death. Other translators and publishers were attacked. In 2022, after Rushdie had begun to live as though the warrant were an antique, a man rushed a stage in New York and tried to finish the job; Rushdie lost an eye. The edict had outlived the ayatollah who signed it.

Nor are they a pair of unlucky celebrities. Lars Vilks spent fourteen years under police protection for a drawing and died with his bodyguards in a car crash. Kurt Westergaard survived an axe at his door. Mina Ahadi, Hamed Abdel-Samad, Ehsan Jami, Bassam Tibi, and other reformers or ex-Muslims across Europe have required police details for saying in Berlin or Amsterdam what a citizen is supposed to be free to say in a café. A Henry Jackson Society survey could already list dozens of people of Muslim background in Europe who had been threatened for speech, and the list was never going to be complete, because completeness would require the frightened to raise their hands.

This is the first article because it is the one that still costs flesh. If leaving is punishable, choice is a slogan. If a novelist needs a security detail, an apostate needs a safe house, and a cartoonist needs a panic room, then the peace being advertised is a protection racket with better stationery. The Open Society Test begins here: say that no one — daughter, son, neighbour, stranger — should be hunted for walking away.

2. I am a Muslim, and civil law must take precedence over religious law.

Not in conversation with. Not as far as faith allows. Precedence. The instant a parallel jurisdiction is conceded — family rulings that discount a woman’s word, shrink her inheritance, or treat her as a transferable ward — the republic has agreed to be a landlord with a tenant who rewrites the lease. Keep your prayers. Do not keep a veto.

3. I am a Muslim, and women must possess the same rights before the law — and the same freedom, dignity, and opportunity in society — as men.

This is not a tribal chant about the West. It is the refusal to treat half of humanity as a doctrinal inconvenience. Male guardianship, unequal testimony, polygyny reserved as a man’s option, the public management of female skin — these are not heritage displays. They are a politics of the body. A community that cannot say women are legal equals has already chosen its century.

4. I am a Muslim, and gay people possess the same civil rights that I do.

No one is asking for a fatwa of congratulations. The civic point is blunt: the state is not a purity board for adults' bedrooms. If the text cannot endure that, the text does not get a police force.

5. I am a Muslim, and criticism of my religion is not violence against me. My beliefs are entitled to legal protection; they are not entitled to immunity from scrutiny, satire, disagreement, or offence.

Here is the great semantic fraud of the age: the conversion of argument into assault. A conviction that cannot survive a joke is not a conviction; it is a protection racket. Legal protection means you may worship, publish, assemble, and be free of official persecution. It does not mean the rest of us must genuflect before a perfect book, a perfect man, or a history recast as an unbroken compliment.

6. I am a Muslim, and I respect the right of every free person to criticize my religion, to reject it, to satirize it, and even to publish or display drawings of Muhammad. I may answer with words, argument, persuasion, or peaceful protest — but never with threats, intimidation, or violence.

The cartoon is the test because it is trivial. Ink. If ink is war, the faith has declared war on everyone else's ordinary freedoms. The adult reply to a drawing is another drawing, a sermon, a letter to the editor, a shrug. The other reply has been tried, and we remember the murdered more clearly than we remember the explanations.

7. I am a Muslim, and terrorism committed in Islam’s name must be confronted intellectually and theologically, not merely condemned ceremonially after innocent people have died.

The press conference of sorrow is inexpensive; it costs nothing to denounce murder once murder has already made the case. What costs something is to name the doctrines the killer did not invent — the traditions about the apostate, the blasphemer, the combatant, the hypocrite, the Jew. If those cannot be specified and rejected, the condemnation is weather.

8. I am a Muslim, and no grievance — historical, political, or religious — justifies antisemitism, intimidation, or violence.

The oldest hatred does not become an analysis because it now arrives with a flag and a reading list. Occupation does not license a pogrom in a European street. Medieval wars do not license a knife in a modern city. “Zionist” is not an incantation that turns a mob into a faculty meeting. A politics that requires Jews as its organizing principle is not a politics. It is a relapse.

9. I am a Muslim, and I reject hatred of the Jew as a category, and I will live in peace with the Jew as neighbour and fellow citizen — not as an enemy assigned to me by scripture.

This is not a restatement of the eighth article. Article Eight forbids using grievance as an excuse for violence. This one demands something the record shows is considerably harder to obtain: an actual renunciation of the specific religious material that keeps regenerating the grievance in the first place.

Hamas’ founding 1988 charter does not merely announce a territorial dispute; its seventh article quotes, as scripture, a hadith recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, in which the stones and trees themselves will call out on the Day of Judgment to expose a Jew hiding behind them — every tree but the gharqad, which alone will stay silent and let him live. That is not a metaphor about settlements. It is an eschatology with an ethnic target, footnoted to the two most trusted collections in Sunni Islam.

In 2017 Hamas issued a revised document that swapped “Jew” for “Zionist” throughout and announced that its quarrel was with the Zionist project rather than with Jews because of their religion — a useful rhetorical laundering that the movement never bothered to complete by actually repudiating the 1988 charter, which by its own officials’ account remains on the shelf as a historical record of the movement’s past rather than a text formally torn up.

The record is not one-sided, and it belongs in the argument rather than out of it. Jewish communities under Muslim rule in medieval Andalusia and the Ottoman world were taxed and legally subordinate as dhimmis, yet frequently fared better than their counterparts who endured expulsion, forced conversion, and pogrom across contemporary Christian Europe. That history is real.

But nostalgia for medieval toleration is not a substitute for an unconditional, contemporary renunciation of the specific modern material — charters, sermons, textbooks, telethons — that still recruits a fourteen-century-old hadith into a live political program. Say that the Jew is not the enemy scripture promised you. Say it without the word Zionist doing the euphemistic work that “immigrant” sometimes does for other, older words. Then the article on civil law outranking religious law has something to actually mean, because it will have been tested against the one grievance history shows is hardest to give up.

10. I am a Muslim, and the laws of the democratic country in which I live take precedence over any religious code.

Yes, this repeats an earlier article. Some nails need hitting twice. Dual loyalty is not a smear when a man tells you that God’s statute book outranks the parliament he votes in. The compact is simple: one law, publicly made, equally applied. If that is bigotry, then so is every constitution worth the name.

11. I am a Muslim, and integration is not humiliation. Equality is not persecution. Criticism is not hatred. Reform is not betrayal.

This is the lexicon that has been stood on its head. Asking a citizen to accept an open society is not to grind him. To give his daughter the same legal personhood as his son is not to persecute him. To laugh at a prophet is not to hunt a people. To say a medieval penalty must die is not to leave the faith. It is to refuse to make other people die for it.

The Open Society Test does not require the unbeliever to become an exegete, and that is its virtue. For a generation the West has outsourced its spine to people who treat every atrocity as a public-relations problem and every demand for reciprocity as a hate crime — a snobbery so refined it looks like kindness, the secular mind that will mock Rome by reflex and then discover, when the subject is Islam, a sudden piety about lived experience and community cohesion. Cohesion around what? Around the right to leave? Around the equality of women? Around the legality of a cartoon? Around a Jew’s right to walk down a street that isn’t named for the hadith about the tree that wouldn’t hide him?

There are Muslims who already pass this test and do not need a slogan to do it. They are not the problem. The problem is the permission structure that treats their courage as optional and the theocrat’s veto as authenticity. The problem is the official who would rather scold the artist than the man who wants the artist dead. The problem is the superstition that a religion still unable to produce a loud, ordinary, unqualified repudiation of the apostasy penalty, the blasphemy riot, the second-class status of women, and the gharqad tree has nevertheless earned an exemption from the rules that bind every other doctrine.

“This is not Islam” is an argument about a vapour. “I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving” is an argument about a person — and about the people who still cannot appear in public without protection because someone, citing the noble peace, decided that leaving was a capital matter. Print the articles. Ask public men to read them. Ask imams to sign them. Ask parties that hunt the vote whether they agree. Those who can say them are fellow citizens in the only sense that matters.

That is not a conclusion about God. It is a conclusion about us. And it is past time the West stopped asking permission to remain an open society.

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Mark Twain once accused the novelist James Fenimore Cooper of committing 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115 in less than a page. This achievement deserves far more respect than it has received. Most bad writers require several thousand words to reach that level of criminality. Cooper, according to Twain, could apparently manage it before breakfast.

Twain’s 1895 essay, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences, remains one of the great literary executions because Twain did not merely announce that Cooper was a bad writer. He arraigned him. He assembled the evidence, stated the charges and proceeded with something approaching the good humour of a man adjusting the noose on the condemned man.

Among Twain’s rules was one that should probably be stapled above every keyboard: use the right word, not its second cousin.

More than a century later, I think we should reopen the case. Not against Cooper. The man has suffered enough. Against us.

At the end of the day.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

A perfect storm.

The calm before the storm.

Weather the storm.

A ray of sunshine.

A breath of fresh air.

When it rains, it pours.

Let us begin with weather, because weather has done enough damage to English prose.

If you are writing an essay and find yourself reaching for a storm, resist. If something difficult happened, you do not need to weather it. If several difficult things happened at once, they did not constitute a perfect storm. If matters are about to deteriorate, we do not need the calm before the storm. If hope appears, please don't let the sun break through the clouds. The English language has endured several centuries of atmospheric abuse. Give the climate a rest.

Rain has suffered particularly badly. Writers have rained on parades, saved things for rainy days, discovered that when it rains it pours, come in out of the rain and waited patiently for the rainbow afterward. There cannot possibly be any rain left. We have used it all. Although hail is a bit underused.

Clouds are no better. Every one of them apparently contains silver, usually in the lining, although nobody has ever explained why clouds require tailoring. Sunshine follows darkness. Spring follows winter. Droughts afflict creativity. Ideas blossom after rain. Relationships turn cold. Tempers become heated. Political climates change. People receive frosty receptions. Projects are put on ice.

And then there is the roller coaster.

Years ago, in a creative-writing class, I heard someone begin a poem with approximately this proposition: “Life is like a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs.”

Something inside me died. I think the poem was an ode to their grandfather, who had also died.

After that, a few of us began noticing roller coasters everywhere. Love was a roller coaster. University was a roller coaster. Marriage was a roller coaster. Careers were roller coasters. Parenting was a roller coaster. The stock market, having at least some claim to violent vertical movement, naturally got one too.

Apparently the whole of human existence takes place at Canada’s Wonderland.

The problem is not that the roller-coaster metaphor is logically inaccurate. Life really does contain highs and lows. So does an elevator. So does a staircase. So does the blood pressure of a man reading an essay containing six roller-coaster metaphors.

The problem is that we have seen it before.

Clichés are a little like the devastatingly attractive boy or girl you noticed in first-year university — the one who made your knees weak and, in my case, probably never once made eye contact with me. At the time, they were magnificent. So were clichés.

The first person who wrote that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” may genuinely have produced a fresh image. But metaphors, like people, can have hard lives. Forty years of abuse, neglect, repetition and being passed around by everyone in sight take their toll. By the time a cliché reaches us, it has been used in bad speeches, corporate memos, wedding toasts, university essays, motivational posters and PowerPoint presentations approximately twelve million times. Whatever beauty it possessed in its first year is gone. It is now seventy-four, standing behind the English department smoking beside the dumpster and asking whether anyone has spare change.

A cliché is rather like a perfectly good shirt that has been worn, washed, stretched, borrowed and slept in by so many people that it no longer has a shape. The material may technically remain intact. That does not mean you should wear it to dinner.

Why should any of this matter? Because writing is fundamentally an attempt to secure and hold another person’s attention. The reader owes you nothing. He did not sign a contract promising to finish your essay. He can leave whenever he likes, and nowadays another article, video, notification, email and photograph of somebody’s lunch are all standing nearby offering him somewhere else to go.

Think of your reader as clinging to the side of a lifeboat. Your job is to keep him aboard. A fresh observation pulls him upward. An unexpected sentence gives him a handhold. A metaphor he has never encountered makes him look twice.

Then you write that life is a journey.

One hand slips.

You tell him there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Now he is hanging by three fingers.

You tell him that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, that everything happens for a reason, and that, at the end of the day, we must think outside the box.

There is a small splash.

You have lost the reader.

This is why good writing is not principally a matter of decorating sentences. It is a matter of seeing. The writer has to look at something familiar long enough to notice what everybody else stopped noticing.

Shakespeare was magnificent at this. He played with the machinery of English. Nouns became verbs. Familiar ideas appeared in unfamiliar clothing. His metaphors did not merely communicate information; they forced the mind to construct an image. That tiny moment of construction matters. The reader wakes up.

That is why clichés signal something worse than inelegance. They suggest that the writer reached the place where thought was required and decided not to proceed.

The sentence arrived at a fork in the road.

Naturally, it took the road less travelled.

Along with everybody else.

Oh, yes—one more thing. Adjectives suck. Concentrate on your verbs.

And I nearly forgot the ultimate clichéd metaphor: fire. Please spare me the fire in your heart, the sparks of love, the embers of desire, the cinders of your broken dreams, and the ashes of whatever you just burned for symbolic purposes.

Stop it. Stop it now.

And under no circumstances may anyone rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

No.

No, no, no.

And nothing about breaking the chains that constrain you. Nothing ever about chains.

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Donald Trump called April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day.” It was one of those phrases that only Trump could have invented: grandiose, theatrical, and so disproportionate to the event that it bordered on parody.

America was apparently about to be liberated. From what? Cheap goods? Efficient supply chains? Comparative advantage? The freedom of American consumers and businesses to buy things from whichever producer could make them best and cheapest?

More than a year later, we have enough evidence to judge Trump’s experiment against the standards Trump himself established for it. Tariffs were going to bring manufacturing back to America. They were going to reduce America’s enormous trade imbalances. Foreigners were going to pay them. They were going to usher in a new American industrial golden age.

So where is it?

The theory presented to Americans was wonderfully simple. America imports too much because foreigners have taken advantage of it. Tax foreign goods heavily enough and companies will manufacture those products in America. Factories will reopen, manufacturing employment will soar, and industrial America will rise from the dead.

There is only one annoying problem: it hasn’t happened.

Manufacturing did not suddenly become a larger part of the American economy after Liberation Day. Manufacturing employment weakened through much of 2025 rather than experiencing anything resembling the promised renaissance. There have been genuine bright spots in industrial production and particular industries, and Trump’s defenders are entitled to point to them. But this was not advertised as a program to produce a few bright spots. It was advertised as the rebirth of American manufacturing.

If an American company can purchase a component from Canada for $80 but manufacturing it domestically costs $110, imposing a $40 tariff makes the $110 American product suddenly look competitive.

But nothing has become more efficient. The American producer hasn’t improved, and the Canadian producer hasn’t worsened. Government has simply converted an $80 economic choice into a $110 one.

This is the basic principle of comparative advantage. Nations prosper by producing things they are relatively good at producing and trading for things others produce more efficiently. If Donald Trump had his genome sequenced, scientists would discover a previously unknown chromosome: WIN/LOSE.

He is convinced that if America imports $100 from another country and exports only $70, the other country has apparently beaten America 100–70.

But commerce is not the Super Bowl. The American who bought the imported television preferred the television to his money. The foreign manufacturer preferred the money to the television. Both sides believed themselves better off. That is why the transaction occurred.

The current account is broader than the familiar trade deficit, incorporating trade in goods and services as well as international income flows. More importantly, America’s trade deficits have a financial counterpart: capital flows into America. Foreigners who accumulate dollars buy Treasury securities, American stocks, businesses and other assets. The United States attracts staggering amounts of foreign capital because the world considers America an extraordinarily attractive place to invest. That is hardly evidence of American weakness.

Those capital inflows also support the dollar. A stronger dollar makes imports cheaper for Americans while making American exports more expensive abroad. Trump therefore wants several things simultaneously that work against one another: America as the world’s premier destination for capital, a powerful dollar, vastly greater exports and vastly fewer imports. Economics stubbornly refuses to make all four wishes come true simultaneously.

There is an even simpler embarrassment. America’s goods deficit reached roughly $1.24 trillion in 2025. The overall goods-and-services deficit declined slightly, from about $903.5 billion in 2024 to $901.5 billion in 2025, but that improvement reflected America’s strength in services offsetting deterioration in goods. The goods deficit itself increased.

There are legitimate qualifications. World trade is not perfectly free. China subsidizes industries, has engaged in intellectual-property abuses and protects politically favoured sectors. America also has legitimate national-security reasons for maintaining domestic capacity in weapons, medicines, semiconductors and other strategically essential products. A perfectly respectable argument exists for targeted strategic protection. But that is not an argument for indiscriminately taxing imports from half the planet.

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I first met my future son in late 2003. I won’t call him my stepson. I have never liked the word. Stepson seems to arrive carrying centuries of rather dreadful public relations.

Perhaps I feel particularly strongly because I was adopted. I am my father’s son. I am my mother’s son. There is no asterisk after either sentence. The absence of a blood connection did not make them partial parents or me some lesser category of child. They were my parents because they raised me. They worried about me. They disciplined me. They loved me.

Blood is one way families begin. It is not the only way they become families. And so it was with Vanya.

When I came into his life, his biological father was already absent from it. Since I came on the scene, Vanya has had no relationship with him. Once he left Russia, there was no contact at all. No visits. No phone calls. No second father somewhere sharing the work or occupying some parallel place in his life. And make no mistake, I was happy for this.

There was me. I adopted him when he was very young. I raised him. I worried about him. I took him to school and hockey and rugby. I celebrated him. I fought with him. I lost sleep over him. I loved him.

And I first met my future son in the city of Veliky Novgorod in late 2003. I was courting his mother and had travelled to this ancient Russian city north of St. Petersburg, a place of churches, stone, snow and history far older than anything I had grown up around in Canada.

Vanya’s mum and I walked toward one of those long Soviet-era apartment blocks, designed less by an architect than by a committee charged with proving that personal charm was bourgeois. Four floors, if I remember correctly. No elevator. The entrance was protected by one of those solid Soviet metal doors, as if designed with suspicion toward outsiders. There was a mechanical combination lock. Every entrance seemed identical to every other.

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Inside was the apartment where Vanya lived with his mother and grandmother, Rionalda, who would later become my mother-in-law and move to join us in Canada. The apartment had a peculiar layout to me but was perfectly natural to everyone who lived there. There was the kitchen, separate from the living room, and then the bedrooms followed one another in sequence, almost like railway compartments arranged along a rectangle, one room giving way to another rather than opening independently onto some generous North American hallway.

Hot water came through the kolonka, the gas water heater mounted in the apartment, a piece of machinery I regarded with the respectful suspicion Canadians reserve for household appliances involving open flame.

And there, inside this entirely ordinary Russian apartment, Rionalda had dressed up her grandson to meet me. Vanya was on the cusp of three. He was small, serious, curious and completely incapable of speaking English to me.

I spoke almost no Russian. It didn’t matter very much.

His mother and grandmother had to work, so during my visits Vanya and I spent enormous amounts of time together during the days. We played on the floor with toys I had brought for him from Canada. We communicated by pointing, demonstrating, laughing, and occasionally looking at one another with the mutual resignation of two people who understood perfectly well that the other was speaking nonsense.

Then we went walking. The Russian winter was bitter. Vanya would be bundled up, and I would take him through the parks and streets of Novgorod, right next to the river Volkov and the ancient kremlin that ran by the park.

Every so often, an elderly babushka would stop us. She would inspect Vanya. Then she would inspect me. Somehow she knew. Perhaps foreigners walked differently. Perhaps Canadians carried small Russian children with insufficient winter vigilance. Whatever betrayed me, these women seemed instantly to grasp that the child was Russian and the adult accompanying him was not. Without ceremony, one would reach over and tighten Vanya’s scarf. Perhaps pull his hat down farther. Then send us on our way. It was never hostile. It was grandmotherly concern exercised across international borders.

His mother and I married in 2005. Vanya attended the wedding dressed in an outfit that deserves permanent preservation in a museum of international childhood diplomacy. He wore a proper white shirt. A small black bow tie. A black jacket. And then, below the waist, Manchester United shorts and soccer socks that I had brought him from Canada. The top half announced a solemn matrimonial occasion. The bottom half announced Saturday afternoon at Old Trafford. He looked magnificent.

Then life began accelerating. We moved to Canada. We lived for a time in Fort McMurray, AB, where I was teaching at the college. Vanya started school. On his first day, I somehow managed to leave without giving him a proper goodbye. I had already begun walking away when his teacher came running down the sidewalk after me. Vanya was crying. He wanted his father to come back. Not because something terrible had happened. He simply wanted the goodbye done properly. So I went back. And did it properly.

Years fell off. Eventually we moved to Ontario. Vanya did well at school. In Grade 9, he won a mathematics and science award. I remember the pride of that moment because there was nothing ambiguous about it. He was doing well. He was capable. Teachers saw it. We saw it. He was not some great prodigy being groomed for MIT. He was simply a bright kid doing well. And I was enormously proud of him.

He played soccer and rugby. He played hockey too, although hockey had not originally fascinated him. He was an ordinary house-league player, much as I had been. No scouts appeared. No NHL franchise was ever endangered by his decision to pursue academics. But I remember one game particularly well. I sat in one of those Canadian arenas whose principal architectural objective seems to be ensuring that parents suffer alongside their children. I was freezing. Vanya played. And that night he was named man of the match.

It was a small thing. Almost nothing, against the backdrop of a whole life. But parenthood is made largely from these almost-nothings. A school award. A good hockey game. A teacher running after you because your son needs another goodbye. A little boy in a bow tie and Manchester United shorts. For a while, life felt wonderfully ordinary.

Then circumstances shifted. Because of regulations governing his mother’s medical practice at the time, she couldn't initially establish her practice in Toronto, so we were forced to move outside the large urban areas and ended up in Peterborough.

Five years later, when we could move back toward Toronto, Vanya had to leave behind the friends he had made there. Adults often underestimate what moving means to children. For us it means houses. For them it can mean a vanished civilization. His Peterborough friends were now far away. The friendships faded. New ones did not replace them easily. Vanya had never been the social butterfly his younger sister would become. He withdrew. And increasingly, he withdrew into gaming.

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Jason Arday is dead. He leaves behind a wife and children who must now bear an immeasurable loss. Whatever one thinks of his conduct, scholarship or public claims, there is nothing here to celebrate. A death is not a debating point, and grief should not be conscripted into anyone’s political campaign.

Before his death, substantial questions had been raised about Arday’s academic work, qualifications and autobiographical claims. Cambridge had begun an investigation. Students had also alleged inadequate teaching or supervision, and there were reports that student complaints were met with accusations of racism or white privilege.

Arday had apparently imbibed the poison that any criticism of a black man is always made in bad faith.

It remains important to establish who made those accusations and in what circumstances. Those are the facts to be examined. But Arday himself is no longer available to answer them.

Arday did not award himself his doctorate. He did not appoint himself to successive university positions. He did not make himself a professor at Cambridge or produce the publicity that turned his appointment into an international morality tale.

Committees approved him. Senior academics endorsed him. Administrators promoted him. Communications departments converted him into an emblem of institutional virtue.

That scrutiny cannot begin with Arday’s arrival at Cambridge. It must follow the entire chain from his undergraduate education and doctoral supervision through every appointment, promotion, reference, publication and honour that carried him there.

Each institution should disclose what it verified, what concerns it received and how it responded. Appointment records and internal correspondence should be preserved and independently reviewed. Students and faculty members must be able to give evidence without professional retaliation.

The questions are elementary. Who read his work? Who checked his qualifications? Who examined the more improbable parts of his public biography? Who dismissed earlier warnings? Who decided that further inquiry was unnecessary—or ideologically inconvenient?

Arday was institutionally useful. His biography supplied an irresistible story of adversity overcome. His appointment advertised the moral enlightenment of those who made it.

This was not colourblindness. They saw his colour perfectly well. That was part of his value to them.

If they promoted him because his identity and biography served their own reputational purposes, they did not honour him. They used him. They placed him in the institutional shop window, enjoyed the admiration his presence attracted and left him exposed when the story could no longer withstand examination.

This is why the investigation cannot be one of those ceremonial exercises designed to survive a news cycle. There must be no polished report announcing that “lessons have been learned” before everyone returns quietly to the same offices and hiring committees.

Due process is essential. No one should lose a career because of speculation, association or political disagreement. But due process is a means of determining responsibility, not a promise that nobody will be held responsible.

If an independent investigation finds that officials knowingly ignored disqualifying evidence, suppressed complaints, retaliated against students, misrepresented Arday’s record or applied standards they would not have applied to another candidate, resignations and dismissals should follow.

It would be grotesque for the institutions that profited from his ascent to treat his collapse as an unfortunate natural event for which nobody was responsible.

It also requires asking the question universities would prefer to avoid: How many more Jason Ardays are there?

This is not an invitation to suspect every Black academic. It demands that universities stop behaving in ways that cast suspicion on accomplished Black scholars who earned their positions without favour, embellishment or theatrical sponsorship.

The problem is not limited to race. It arises whenever an institution prefers an identity, biography or politically useful narrative to demonstrated ability. Qualified candidates of every background lose opportunities when committees select the person who offers administrators the most flattering story.

Meritocracy has never been perfect. It can be corrupted by patronage, inherited privilege and prejudice. The answer is to make standards fairer and more exacting—not to replace standards with ideological pageantry.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed that his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” Character is a demanding standard because it recognizes the complete person: virtues and failings, achievements and responsibilities, dignity and agency.

Indeed, what to make of it when criticism of a Black person is treated as presumptively racist? An accusation about the complainant's motives does not answer a complaint about poor teaching. A question about plagiarism is not resolved by examining the politics of the person who noticed it. Scholarship requires answering evidence with evidence.

To presume that Black scholars require protection from ordinary professional scrutiny is not respect. It is condescension.

It is also destructive. If every setback is persecution and every critic acts in bad faith, self-examination becomes impossible. Encouraging someone to attribute every failure to outside hostility teaches an external locus of control. Success remains his achievement, but error is always someone else’s fault.

A person who believes that nothing is his responsibility must eventually believe that nothing is within his power to change. He cannot learn from criticism because he has defined criticism as aggression. He cannot correct a mistake because acknowledging it would validate an enemy. He is left with the consoling but paralyzing identity of permanent victim.

No young person should be taught to react to adversity by asking only which prejudice caused it. Young Black men will sometimes encounter genuine racism, and they should be prepared to identify and resist it. But they must also retain the capacity to distinguish an injustice imposed from outside from a failure they possess the power to correct. Resilience depends upon both capacities.

The danger now is that Arday’s entire story will be reduced to a simple narrative in which a racist society hounded an innocent man to death. Such a narrative would be emotionally convenient and intellectually dishonest.

Nor would that narrative serve his family, Black scholarship or racial equality. It would serve those who crave the sugar rush of public righteousness: the open letter, the denunciation, the performance of solidarity and the applause of people already in agreement. These gestures cost their authors very little. Arday paid a far greater price for the institutional story constructed around him.

Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. It neither vindicates his critics nor absolves his defenders. It is tragic because a human being is dead, children have lost their father, and a wife has lost her husband.

We should mourn him and show mercy to those who loved him. But mercy does not require falsehood, and mourning does not require silence.

Jason Arday is dead. His enablers are alive. They hold titles, occupy offices, sit on committees and continue to exercise power over students and scholars. Now some are feeding off his carcass, proclaiming that all criticism of him was driven by systemic racism.

I eagerly await Al Sharpton and other such racialized confidence men to join the feeding frenzy.

But before that the institutions that pushed Arday forward must answer for their actions.

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Introduction

History is not chemistry.

No historian possesses a master database cataloguing every siege, humanitarian corridor, civilian warning, territorial withdrawal, hostage crisis, or underground battlefield. Wars resist laboratory comparison. They differ in terrain, technology, purpose, law, and moral character. Historians can identify precedents and patterns; they cannot reduce human conflict to a controlled experiment.

That is the necessary qualification. It should not become an excuse for refusing comparison altogether.

Not every feature of Israel’s war against Hamas is literally without precedent.

Tunnel warfare has precedents. Urban warfare has precedents. Hostage-taking and humanitarian corridors have precedents. The argument is that modern history offers few, if any, conflicts in which so many extraordinary features have appeared simultaneously—and none in which a democracy confronting them has been subjected to quite the same combination of military expectations, moral suspicion, and historical amnesia.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and associated armed groups crossed Israel’s border under cover of thousands of rockets. Approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted into Gaza. Entire communities were overrun. Families were slaughtered in their homes. Children and elderly people were dragged into captivity. Sexual violence was committed. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and the most extensive hostage crisis in Israel’s history.

Instead, the moral chronology began to dissolve almost at once. The massacre receded into the background while the response moved to the foreground. The invasion became “context”; the counteroffensive became the crime requiring explanation. Israel’s right of self-defence was ceremonially affirmed and then surrounded by expectations that threatened to render it unusable.

The framework for the war in Gaza is not counter-terrorism; it is war. The war in Gaza is arguably a unique challenge in the history of war. No urban battle had an adversary spend twenty years preparing for battle. No army has had a strategy where the enemy wants their own civilians to be killed so as to maximize their propaganda value. No army has ever forced its civilians to stay in the combat zone like Gaza, where Egypt notably did not allow non-combatants to cross the southern border into the massive Sinai Desert.

What follows is not an argument for Israeli perfection. It is an inquiry into historical exception.

Almost no Western government denied Israel’s right to defend itself. Most affirmed it explicitly. The expectation imposed upon Israel was stranger: it could defend itself, provided the defence did not produce the consequences historically associated with war, especially with urban war.

Israel was expected to destroy a heavily armed terrorist organization embedded beneath one of the world’s densest urban environments, recover hostages hidden underground, protect its soldiers, distinguish combatants who frequently wore no uniform, and somehow avoid civilian deaths on a scale no army has achieved in comparable urban warfare.

The world did not merely ask Israel to obey the laws of war. It expected something approaching a surgical operation against an enemy that had deliberately designed the battlefield to make surgery impossible.

No army has demonstrated an ability to fight an underground urban enemy without killing civilians. The United States could not do so in Fallujah. The coalition could not do so in Mosul. Russia did not seriously attempt it in Grozny. The battles for Manila, Hue, Aleppo, Raqqa, and Mariupol all left civilians dead and cities in ruins.

Yet Gaza presented challenges even those battles did not. Military historian and urban warfare expert John Spencer has argued that no modern army has ever confronted a battlefield in which an enemy constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels beneath a densely populated city, prevented much of the civilian population from taking shelter within them, booby-trapped entrances, and repeatedly emerged from beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure to attack before disappearing underground again.

The International Committee of the Red Cross states the matter with bleak simplicity: urban warfare kills, injures, and displaces more civilians—and destroys more essential infrastructure—than fighting in open terrain. That is why urban warfare is feared.

The relevant question is not whether every Israeli action was wise or lawful. It is whether any democracy has defeated a comparable enemy while achieving the casualty standard Israel was expected to meet—and whether those demanding such an achievement can identify the military method by which it could have been accomplished.

“Surgical” is not a strategy. It is an adjective employed by people spared the obligation of explaining the operation.

The military expectations imposed upon Israel were extraordinary for another reason. No modern war has ever made the distinction between combatants and civilians a central battleground of propaganda.

Under the law of armed conflict, civilians lose their protection from direct attack while they take a direct part in hostilities. A man or woman carrying ammunition to a fighting position, transporting weapons, firing rockets, acting as a lookout, or emerging from a tunnel to attack soldiers is not rendered a civilian simply because he or she wears jeans and is 14, 15, 16 or 17 years old.

Yet throughout the Gaza war, Hamas frequently asserted that those killed were civilians, often without distinguishing fighters from non-combatants. Those figures were then repeated around the world before any independent verification could occur. The result was a conflict in which the debate often shifted away from military conduct itself and toward competing casualty narratives.

The informational environment was equally unprecedented. Approximately one-fifth of Hamas’s rockets are estimated by Israeli and other military assessments to have fallen short and landed inside Gaza itself. Those failures posed an obvious danger to Gaza’s own population. Yet in the public narrative, almost every explosion was instinctively attributed to Israel, while comparatively little attention was paid to the casualties and destruction caused by misfired Palestinian rockets or by Hamas’s own military practices.

Spencer argues that the closest historical comparison is not a counter-insurgency campaign but the Battle of Manila in 1945. There, approximately 35,000 American troops fought some 17,000 entrenched Japanese defenders while attempting to liberate thousands of prisoners of war and civilians trapped inside the city. By the battle’s end, roughly 100,000 civilians had been killed, and much of Manila lay in ruins.

Few historians regard those civilian deaths as evidence that the United States lacked the right to destroy the Japanese garrison. Rather, they are understood as one of the terrible realities of urban warfare.

The same historical amnesia surrounds many other conflicts.

During the Korean War, civilian deaths are estimated in the millions over three years of fighting, averaging well over 50,000 deaths per month. During the Somali civil war and the humanitarian catastrophe of the early 1990s, between 200,000 and 300,000 civilians died from violence, famine, and state collapse despite repeated international relief efforts, including those led by the United Nations.

These catastrophes rightly received attention, yet they never produced the sustained global protest movement, continuous social-media mobilization, or singular moral focus directed at Israel.

None of this establishes that every Israeli military decision was correct. Democracies remain accountable for the lawful use of force. But it raises a question critics rarely answer. If Israel was expected to defeat Hamas while avoiding civilian casualties on a scale unprecedented in the history of comparable urban warfare, what operational method would have achieved that result? Condemning the outcome is not enough. One must also explain the alternative.

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Conquering powers have sometimes returned territory, usually through negotiated settlements, military pressure, or imperial collapse. It would therefore be foolish to claim that Israel alone has relinquished land. It is equally foolish to repeat the caricature of a state pathologically incapable of withdrawal.

Under its peace treaty with Egypt, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, including settlements, air bases, oil fields, and an enormous strategic buffer acquired after repeated wars. The territory was several times Israel's size. The treaty required the withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces and civilians and the restoration of full Egyptian sovereignty.

Israel later withdrew from southern Lebanon. In 2005, it dismantled every Israeli settlement and permanent military installation in Gaza, forcibly removing thousands of its own citizens. Under the Oslo process, it transferred substantial governing authority to the Palestinian Authority.

Returning strategically valuable land is not the normal reflex of victorious states.

Victors generally consolidate their gains until compelled to surrender them. Russia has not returned Crimea as a confidence-building experiment. China does not regard Tibet as a negotiable inconvenience. Turkey has not withdrawn from northern Cyprus. Morocco has not abandoned its claim to Western Sahara.

Israel relinquished territory repeatedly in the hope that land might be exchanged for peace. The result was not always peace. From Gaza came Hamas rule, rocket fire, tunnel construction, and ultimately October 7.

Advance warnings are not an Israeli invention. International humanitarian law requires effective warning when circumstances permit, and other armies have issued warnings in previous conflicts. A warning does not automatically make a subsequent attack lawful. It must be meaningful, civilians must have a realistic opportunity to seek safety, and those who remain do not forfeit their civilian status.

What is unusual is the scale and variety of the warning system Israel developed over successive Gaza conflicts: telephone calls, text messages, leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, social-media announcements, mapped evacuation zones, designated humanitarian routes, and notices preceding major operations.

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) case study of the 2014 Gaza conflict observed that the IDF frequently communicated warnings through multiple channels simultaneously, at times taking precautions beyond reliance on a single method.

A warning does not reach only the mother gathering up her children. It also reaches the fighter moving his weapons, the commander relocating his headquarters, and the hostage-taker shifting his captives. Every warning that protects civilians also diminishes surprise and may confer a military advantage upon the very force being targeted. Israel repeatedly accepted that trade-off in an effort to reduce civilian casualties.

Humanitarian corridors are not unprecedented. Civilians have been evacuated through negotiated passages from eastern Aleppo, Mariupol, Sumy, and other battlefields.

Such corridors can save lives. They can also fail, be attacked, or become instruments of coercion. Their creation never relieves an army of its duty to protect civilians who remain.

What is unusual in Gaza is the sustained expectation that Israel must create, protect, and continually rearrange evacuation routes and humanitarian zones inside territory governed by the enemy while preventing that enemy from exploiting them.

A route intended to save civilians can also become a route through which fighters escape. Combatants can enter a humanitarian zone without a uniform. A pause intended to permit civilian movement can allow Hamas to move weapons, relocate commanders, prepare ambushes, or conceal hostages elsewhere.

Israel was expected to create the corridors, protect the people using them, prevent Hamas from exploiting them, and guarantee that no subsequent military necessity would alter their status.

Humanitarian corridors save lives. That should count morally. In Israel’s case, attempts to create them often seemed to generate another category of accusation.

Again, the point is not that Israel’s corridors were flawless. The effort itself was exceptional in scale and duration, particularly when directed toward civilians living among an enemy that treated their presence as a military resource.

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During conflict, countries have permitted humanitarian relief to reach enemy-held territory. Wartime relief has precedents, and international law imposes duties concerning humanitarian access.

Nevertheless, the underlying situation remains extraordinary. During substantial phases of the war, Israel facilitated the entry of food, medicine, fuel, water, and other supplies into territory governed by the organization it was fighting. Aid passed through crossings inspected or operated with Israeli involvement while Israeli soldiers were fighting and dying only miles away.

Did Nazi Germany feed occupied France? Germany extracted enormous resources from France and imposed burdens that contributed to deprivation. Did conventional armies normally provision the populations governed by their enemies while battles continued? More often, war brought sieges, blockades, requisitions, and deliberate exhaustion.

Israel was required simultaneously to destroy Hamas and sustain humanitarian access to the society Hamas governed, a society that polling consistently showed supported Hamas.

Israel had to offer resources to a population among whom its enemy lived, recruited, taxed, and exercised coercive power. Israel had to offer aid to a population that hid hostages amongst them. But aid was necessary because civilians needed it; it was vulnerable to diversion because Hamas remained the governing armed organization.

If Israel inspected aid, it was accused of obstruction. If aid entered and Hamas or criminal groups appropriated it, Israel was blamed for its distribution. If too little arrived, Israel was condemned. If more arrived, the increased flow was treated not as mitigation but as an admission of prior guilt.

Every modern conflict produces propaganda. Democracies exaggerate and conceal. Dictatorships lie. Terrorist organizations lie.

What is unusual is not that Hamas produced propaganda. The remarkable development is that institutions governed by a designated terrorist organization became routine sources of factual claims for journalists, activists, universities, and members of the public.

During the campaign against ISIS, few serious observers treated an ISIS ministry as a disinterested civil authority. Nazi communiqués were not repeated by Allied broadcasters as presumptively neutral statistics. Saddam Hussein’s government was not granted automatic credibility merely because it issued information through an office bearing an administrative title. His pronouncements became sources of ridicule.

Yet claims originating in Hamas-controlled Gaza repeatedly travelled through Western media before their origins or evidentiary limitations could catch up with them. In recorded history, there has never been an ongoing battle in which ongoing counts of non-combatants were formulated; it is an artificial construct designed for maximum propaganda value.

The initial reporting about the explosion at Al-Ahli hospital offered the most spectacular example. An immediate claim that Israel had struck the hospital and killed hundreds swept around the world. Canada’s government immediately condemned Israel. Protests erupted, embassies were attacked, and political meetings were cancelled before later visual evidence and intelligence assessments showed that it was a Palestinian terrorist cell that had fired the missile that had killed their own people.

The correction walked. The accusation had already flown.

The extraordinary development was not merely that Hamas generated propaganda. It was that so many Western institutions seemed eager to outsource their skepticism.

History has produced many terrorist organizations. Some attracted political sympathizers and romantic admirers. The Red Army Faction, ETA, the Shining Path, the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others each attracted defenders or apologists somewhere.

What remains extraordinary is the degree to which sympathy for Hamas, or euphemistic descriptions of its violence, became normalized within parts of elite Western culture.

Its slogans appeared at universities. Its massacre was “contextualized” before bodies had been identified. A pro-Hamas social media and anti-Israel propaganda campaign was set up well before Israel responded to the massacre of its civilians.

But Hamas’ violence was described as resistance by people who would never have extended the same indulgence to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, or a white-supremacist organization.

Professors at universities were not only publicly proclaiming Hamas support, but administrations like the University of Guelph treated criticism of support for a terrorist organization as somehow verboten. In spite of calls for violence against Jews, which included “Intifada now” or “Export the intifada,” governments, police forces and university administrations pretend that such threats were passive and political.

At some demonstrations, the moral energy was directed less toward the release of kidnapped civilians than toward the country from which they had been taken. The hostages became a distraction. The massacre became an awkward preface. Hamas dissolved into an abstraction called “resistance,” stripped of its charter, methods, hostages, tunnels, and dead.

The question is why a designated terrorist organization responsible for the deliberate slaughter and abduction of civilians acquired a degree of moral ambiguity in institutions that would have treated comparable violence elsewhere as self-evidently fascistic; it reeks of bad faith.

Historical ignorance explains part of it. Social media explains another part. So does the seduction of the oppressor-and-oppressed template, under which one party is assigned permanent agency and the other permanent innocence.

Once Israel had been designated the oppressor, almost anything done against Israelis could be recategorized as resistance. The act's actual nature became secondary to the political identity of its victim.

That is not moral reasoning. It is the distribution of innocence and guilt according to tribe.

This may be the most extraordinary feature of all.

Israel was invaded on October 7. Its border was breached. Its civilians were massacred and abducted. The organization responsible pledged to repeat the attack. As has often been stated, what happened to Israel is the same as if 45,000 Americans in Michigan were suddenly massacred in an invasion from north of the border. One expects Trump's reaction to have been unrestrained violence.

Yet within days, the invaded country was increasingly portrayed as the principal aggressor. The massacre became background. The response became foreground. The invasion became context. The counterattack became history.

The chronology itself dissolved.

No one would have described the United States as the initiator of war with Imperial Japan because American bombs later fell upon Japanese cities. Britain did not become the invader when it expelled Argentina from the Falkland Islands. Kuwait did not become the aggressor because a coalition removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwaiti territory.

Israel alone seemed required to defend not only every military decision but the moral legitimacy of responding at all. Its right of self-defence was affirmed in principle and withdrawn in practice through the cumulative imposition of impossible conditions.

It could fight Hamas, but not where Hamas was located. It could destroy the tunnels, but not damage what Hamas had built them beneath. It could rescue hostages, but not take the military risks that rescue entailed. It could warn civilians, but the warnings themselves became incriminating. It could facilitate aid, but every deficiency in distribution remained its sole responsibility. It could establish corridors, but it could not guarantee either their exploitation by Hamas or the future safety of every destination. It could defeat its enemy, provided the enemy’s strategy imposed no human cost.

This is not a military standard. It is a demand for paralysis.

Perhaps future historians will discover that Franklin Roosevelt should have thanked Imperial Japan for exposing weaknesses in American naval preparedness. Perhaps Britain ought to have apologized to Argentina for resisting the occupation of the Falkland Islands. Perhaps Kuwait’s principal error was objecting too vigorously to Saddam Hussein’s innovative approach to border adjustment.

Until then, the disappearance of October 7 from the moral chronology deserves explanation.

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Taken individually, the features of this war have historical precedents.

Taken together, they form one of the most unusual military and political situations in modern history: a democracy invaded; approximately 1,200 people killed and 251 abducted; the enemy entrenched beneath a dense civilian environment in hundreds of miles of tunnels; combatants frequently indistinguishable by uniform; children drawn into the moral and military catastrophe; hostages hidden beneath the battlefield; civilians warned through multiple technologies; humanitarian corridors and evacuation zones created and revised during combat; aid facilitated into enemy-governed territory; strategically valuable land previously relinquished; terrorist propaganda treated as routine administrative reporting; and the invaded state transformed, with astonishing speed, into the sole defendant before the court of enlightened opinion.

This is not an argument for national sainthood. Nations are not saints, and war is not an arena in which sainthood is ordinarily available.

It is an argument about exception.

History does not require us to acquit Israel of every charge. It does require us to compare like with like.

They are instruments of condemnation. If every attempt to reduce civilian suffering becomes further evidence of guilt, the argument is no longer about conduct. If no territorial withdrawal counts, no warning mitigates, no corridor saves, no aid delivery matters, no hostage complicates, and no enemy tactic affects the judgment, then the verdict preceded the evidence.

One may condemn particular Israeli actions. One may oppose its government, its strategy, or the war itself. But one should at least possess the intellectual honesty to confront the war Israel was actually fighting.

It was not a surgical procedure conducted in a vacant operating theatre. It was an underground urban war against an irregular army embedded among civilians, governing the territory, holding hundreds of captives, and drawing political advantage from the death of the population beneath which it fought.

That war was going to be terrible for whoever fought it.

The exceptional demand was that Israel alone make it otherwise.

If this assessment is even substantially correct, another question follows. Why has the Middle East’s only liberal democracy become the bête noire of so much of the Western academy, so many international institutions, and so much activist culture? Why are actions that would be tragic necessities in one war presented as singular crimes in another?

No single answer can command certainty. Yet three explanations seem difficult to ignore.

The first is that anti-Semitism did not disappear. It adapted. Long before the State of Israel existed, Jews had been expelled, enslaved, segregated, persecuted, and massacred across successive civilizations. The language changes with the centuries. The habit of exceptionalizing Jews has proved remarkably resilient. That history does not explain every criticism of Israel, nor should it immunize Israel from criticism.

It does, however, make it intellectually reckless to assume that the world’s only Jewish state is judged in complete isolation from two thousand years of inherited prejudice.

The second is the great paradox of the information age. Never has humanity possessed greater access to knowledge, yet genuine understanding often appears to be receding. Information is not wisdom. Access is not comprehension.

Imagine being told that somewhere within a vast continent lie rare but immense deposits of gold, oil, and minerals. If you wander the landscape at random, occasionally striking the ground wherever your eye happens to fall, you are unlikely to discover much of value. The wealth is there, but without maps, geology, and disciplined method, abundance becomes confusion.

The digital world is much the same. The internet contains extraordinary scholarship alongside propaganda, fabrication, half-truths, emotional manipulation, and endless distraction. Those without historical foundations do not merely fail to find the truth; they often become convinced they have found it. The problem is no longer a shortage of information. It is an excess of informational noise.

That helps explain a remarkable paradox. Public discussion of Israel has never been more abundant, yet elementary historical knowledge often remains surprisingly thin.

Many who speak confidently about the conflict know little of Israel’s repeated territorial concessions, rejected peace proposals, the legal and historical claims of both peoples, the political divisions within Palestinian society, or the rights enjoyed by Arab citizens of Israel. Facts without context become raw material for narratives rather than instruments of understanding.

The third explanation is the power of narrative itself. Modern wars are fought not only with missiles and rifles but with stories. Hamas and the broader Islamist movements surrounding it have understood this for decades. The battle for international opinion is not incidental to the conflict; it is one of its principal theatres. In the age of social media, images outrun history, slogans outrun evidence, and moral archetypes outrun careful analysis.

The simple story almost always defeats the complicated truth. Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, have proven to be master propagandists.

Nor has this narrative spread through social media alone. It has found sympathetic audiences across parts of academia, segments of the media, activist organizations, labour unions, and international institutions. Over many years, it has claimed intellectual territory. Once a narrative becomes culturally dominant, people often recruit evidence to defend it rather than test it.

None of this proves that Israel is always right. Democracies deserve criticism, and Israel is no exception. But it does suggest that the extraordinary hostility directed toward Israel cannot be explained by military conduct alone.

If Israel is judged by standards that history has never required of any other democracy, then the question is no longer merely what Israel has done. It is why Israel alone is expected to do what no nation has ever been able to do.

The answer is unlikely to be found in a single cause. Instead, it lies at the intersection of an ancient prejudice, an information age drowning in noise, and the extraordinary power of modern political storytelling.

Only by recognizing all three can we begin to understand why one of the most historically exceptional wars of the modern era has so often been transformed into history’s simplest morality play.

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The Jason Arday affair is not primarily the story of Jason Arday. He has already been subjected to an immense and increasingly personal public examination. There is no particular valour in joining a mob after it has identified the safest available man upon whom to pile.

But to be safe, if it comes out that Arday claims to have been raised by racist wolves, please note that this did not happen.

But the more important story concerns the institutions surrounding him.

Arday did not award himself an undergraduate degree, two master’s degrees or a doctorate. He did not supervise and examine his own dissertation. He did not appoint himself at Roehampton, Durham, Glasgow or Cambridge. He did not peer-review his own articles, issue his own honorary degrees, compose every admiring university biography or declare himself an exceptional scholar. He did not force publishers and journalists to repeat his athletic, charitable and professional achievements until repetition acquired the appearance of proof.

Other people did all of that.

Professors did it. Supervisors did it. External examiners did it. Appointment panels did it. Journal editors, publishers, public-relations departments, honorary-degree committees and senior university administrators did it. These were not bewildered strangers approached at a bus stop. They were credentialled professionals whose authority rests upon their supposed ability to examine evidence, test claims and distinguish scholarship from assertion.

The villain of this story is therefore not Jason Arday. The villain is the academic culture that enabled him, elevated him and found his story so irresistibly flattering to its own moral vanity that truth became an administrative inconvenience.

Perhaps Arday is a fantasist. The accumulating pattern makes the question legitimate. But a fantasist can fantasize alone. It takes a university system to award the fantasy a doctorate, a professorship, a book contract, a ceremonial robe and a press release.

It takes a university system to create this Hogarthian picture of madness. The only thing we are missing is the abundant gin.

A Biography Too Magnificent to Examine

Arday’s original story was already remarkable. He has said that he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delay as a child, did not speak until 11 and learned to read and write at 18. He subsequently completed university degrees and rose to become Cambridge’s youngest black professor.

That story required no additional ornament. Yet the ornaments arrived in battalions.

He was reported to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, continuing after a seizure and an apparent leg fracture. He said he ran 300 miles in three days on a treadmill. He was credited with running 600 miles in six days, an achievement that would place him among the most formidable multiday endurance athletes in recorded history. He claimed to be a professional footballer and snooker player.

Arday reported charitable fundraising increased from £1 million to more than £3 million and eventually to approximately £5 million or £5.5 million.

Biographical accounts associated him with Seven Up!, the famous documentary series that began more than 20 years before he was born.

Then there are Arday’s accounts of racist persecution.

He described a masked intruder confronting him inside a Cambridge faculty building and later threatening him with a knife. After an earlier alleged intrusion, enhanced CCTV was reportedly installed and a panic alarm placed in his office. Yet the supposed armed intruder was not captured by the cameras, no one else appears to have seen him, and the alarm reportedly brought no security response. Arday nevertheless maintained that the encounter occurred.

He also described a severed pig’s head being delivered to his parents’ home and said police questioned local butchers. Reporters later found no photograph of the object, while police reportedly disputed the account of the investigation. Arday has stood by his broader description of racist threats and harassment.

Walter Mitty Finds an Appointments Committee

James Thurber’s Walter Mitty escapes an ordinary and rather disappointing life through heroic fantasies. In his imagination he is an ace pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a fearless military commander and the master of every emergency. Mitty is not evil. There is something almost tender about him. Fantasy supplies the courage and grandeur that reality has withheld.

The crucial point is that Mitty’s adventures remain inside his head.

No medical school appoints him professor of surgery because he imagined performing a miraculous operation. No defence ministry commissions him because he daydreamed about commanding a bomber. No university issues an announcement celebrating his distinguished service in several wars that occurred only while his wife was shopping.

The comedy in the Arday affair lies not in the possibility of fantasy but in its institutional certification.

Mitty may imagine himself a great man. The university supplies the title, the robes, the photographer, the office and the citation.

That changes the target of the satire. The central object of ridicule is no longer the dreamer. It is the solemn committee awarding academic credit for the dream.

Arday may have exaggerated achievements. Only universities could transform those achievements into credentials. He may have supplied questionable scholarship and plagiarized horrible material, committing a double sin. Only supervisors, examiners and editors could certify it as knowledge.

A man can embroider his biography. It takes an institution to upholster a professorial chair with it.

Liverpool John Moores and the Doctorate

Cambridge was the final and most prestigious stop, but it was not the beginning.

Arday completed his doctorate at Liverpool John Moores University. A doctorate is not a decorative certificate awarded in recognition of adversity overcome, nor should it ever become a DEI participation trophy. It is supposed to certify that its holder has demonstrated mastery of a field and the capacity to conduct rigorous, original scholarship.

The ironies here now overlap almost beyond parody. Arday rose to extraordinary prominence as a sociologist despite apparently never having taken a sociology course. Perhaps that would not have mattered anyway, since he has also claimed that, shortly before defending his doctoral dissertation, he suffered memory loss so severe that his knowledge had effectively been wiped clean.

Thus we arrive at the remarkable spectacle of a man obtaining a doctorate after claiming to have lost the knowledge required to defend it, subsequently becoming a professor in a discipline he apparently never formally studied, and eventually being celebrated by one of the world’s most prestigious universities as a leading authority in that very field. At some point, the interesting question ceases to be how Jason Arday managed this. The far more interesting question is what, precisely, the institutions examining, credentialling, hiring and promoting him thought they were doing.

A PhD is supposed to certify that the holder can conduct original research, handle evidence honestly, understand relevant scholarship and produce work capable of surviving expert scrutiny.

That process requires supervisors, internal oversight and external examination. The candidate presents the work, but the university certifies it.

Liverpool John Moore University investigated allegations concerning Arday’s doctorate and did not uphold findings of plagiarism or academic misconduct. It characterized the problems it identified as honest or reasonable errors.

Arday shows no evidence of competence; his students complained he was hopeless, frequently AWOL and, when students would press Arday for meaningful feedback, he would retreat to the safe harbour of DEI advocates - he would impugn the accusers’ motives; they were obviously racist.

But an institutional investigation does not answer every intellectual question merely by announcing that the institution has investigated itself. Who supervised the work? Who examined it? How were the extensive textual similarities evaluated? What standard distinguished an honest mistake from a failure of attribution? Were the alleged parallels examined individually or as a cumulative pattern?

How did a doctorate containing so many disputed passages, self-enforcing loops of Critical Race Theory (CRT) gibberish, not to mention spelling mistakes, become the foundation of an accelerated academic career?

The Academic Relay Race

After Liverpool John Moores came a succession of institutions.

Arday held academic positions at Roehampton and Durham before becoming a professor at Glasgow and then moving to Cambridge. Each institution inherited a record already authenticated by the institutions before it. Each new appointment gave the earlier ones additional credibility.

Roehampton could assume Liverpool John Moores had examined the doctorate. Durham could assume Roehampton had evaluated the scholar. Glasgow could assume Durham had performed due diligence.

Cambridge could look upon Glasgow’s professorship as evidence that somebody, somewhere, must have read the work.

This is how institutional reputation becomes a relay race in which nobody examines the baton. Each university simply passed along the same greasy lump of DEI gristle, congratulating itself on its moral refinement while never asking whether there was any intellectual meat attached to it.

Each university trusts the prestige conferred by the previous university. The candidate rises higher, and the increasing height becomes evidence that the ascent must have been deserved. By the time he reaches Cambridge, questioning the original foundation appears almost eccentric.

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The comparison is imperfect. The institutional reflex is strikingly familiar.

Nathan Cofnas is the Cambridge philosopher whose investigation brought the Jason Arday controversy into public view.

That sequence matters, because before Cofnas began scrutinizing a professor Cambridge had celebrated, Cambridge had scrutinized Cofnas.

Cofnas wrote a Substack essay with empirical claims about measurable admissions criteria for black students at Harvard; there was no racial insult.

Complaints followed. Cambridge subjected Cofnas to a lengthy disciplinary investigation, and Cambridge college Emmanuel College. Cambridge’s investigation eventually reached an awkward conclusion: his published views had violated neither the law nor the university’s free-speech regulations. But he was fired anyway.

Cofnas then began examining Professor Jason Arday, one of Britain’s most celebrated academic success stories. He published evidence alleging extensive plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation and raised other questions about his academic record. Major newspapers entered the story. Cambridge fought back and only opened further investigations under intense media scrutiny. Arday ultimately resigned without admitting any wrongdoing.

Watching this unfold, I was struck by an imperfect Canadian parallel: my own.

What the comparison is—and is not

The most important qualification should come first.

Jason Arday did not cause Nathan Cofnas to be investigated or removed from Emmanuel College. In my case, Professor Wael Ramadan helped initiate and advance the process that eventually cost me my academic employment.

That is a major difference. I do not want to conceal it.

Nor am I comparing the allegations against the two men. I am not accusing Ramadan of plagiarism, fabrication or academic incompetence. The conduct at issue is entirely different.

Cambridge and the University of Guelph are also not remotely comparable institutions. Cambridge sits at the summit of world academia. Guelph-Humber, where I taught as a sessional lecturer, occupies a much more modest place - and in the last two years it has slipped considerably, abandoning committment to teaching quality while focusing on revenue maximization and keeping students happy with soft grading.

Arday became an international story. Mine remains a relatively obscure Canadian academic dispute.

The parallel is not personal, institutional or academic equivalence. It is a parallel in institutional machinery.

In both stories, controversial expressions triggered an energetic university response. In both, the institution had formal commitments to lawful expression. In both, complaints framed the expression partly through its alleged effect on protected groups. And in both, the institution appeared far more willing to scrutinize the controversial speaker than to examine whether its own procedures, priorities and favoured narratives were being applied consistently.

The question connecting the cases is therefore not whether Ramadan “is” Arday or whether I “am” Cofnas.

It is this:

What happens to a university’s commitment to free speech when that commitment collides with DEI priorities, reputational self-protection and institutional ideology? Free speech becomes decorative.

My case began with a private social-media exchange.

I responded to a man in Pakistan and said, in substance, that if he stood with Hamas, he stood with Nazis. I based that comparison on Hamas’s origins in the Muslim Brotherhood and on the documented history of collaboration, shared antisemitism and ideological affinity linking important Brotherhood figures and allies to Nazi Germany.

The recipient was not my student. The comment was not delivered to a class. It was not university teaching, and no student received it from me.

Yet the exchange was transformed into an allegation that I had violated students’ human rights.

I also maintain that the university never possessed an authentic copy of the complete original exchange. The post to which I responded disappeared, and what circulated was an altered or incomplete screenshot of my comment.

Nevertheless, the institutional machinery came roaring to life.

I was suspended. Like Cofnas, an outside lawyer ‘investigator’ was retained. The process stretched across close to two years. During that time, I was interviewed once. The lawyer, Gita Anand of the gunslinging law firm Sherrard Kuzz, was hostile, rude, and hysterical. She made ludicrious accusations of me somehow - before I knew of the man’s existence - posting anti semitic images on his LinkedIN.

It was like being interviewed by a lunatic.

I was ultimately dismissed from my academic employment without a meaningful hearing or appeal. The university encouraged an ugly and cruel defamation campaign against me.

Throughout the process, I kept raising one inconvenient subject: free speech.

Both the University of Guelph and Humber College publish commitments to freedom of expression. I cited those commitments and repeatedly asked how my treatment could be reconciled with them. I received no reply. I am not sure that anyone in administration is aware that they have a free speech policy; perhaps it sits lonely in an unclicked corner of their website.

And then there was Wael Ramadan

This is where the institutional parallel becomes uncomfortable.

After Cambridge scrutinized Cofnas, Cofnas turned his attention to an academic whom Cambridge had celebrated. After the University of Guelph scrutinized me, I began documenting public material bearing the name of a professor whom I believed the institution had treated very differently.

The material I collected under Ramadan’s name includes depictions of Jews with Hitler moustaches; descriptions of Jews as subhuman or devil worshippers; claims assigning collective Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust; and posts or reposts that I interpret as supporting or praising Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Readers need not accept my characterization. The underlying posts should be examined directly.

Journalist John Ivison also reported that a concerned member of the Sheridan College community contacted him about Ramadan’s online statements concerning Israel. Other published reporting has described allegations from students concerning remarks about Jews and Israel in the classroom. Ramadan has a long track record; he is an exemplar for the antisemitic professor.

Jewish students and I submitted three human-rights complaints concerning Ramadan. They were dismissed without any apparent review. Ramadan remains employed.

My private political comment to a person in Pakistan allegedly violated the human rights of students who never received it. That justified suspension, organized institutional defamation, a rubber stamp of an external investigator and a process lasting nearly two years that ended in my termination.

Yet the complaints that Jewish students and I submitted concerning a colleague’s public material were dismissed without anything approaching the process imposed upon me.

The role of DEI

Both cases expose what happens when political fashion and diversity bureaucracy are permitted to outrank neutral rules. The scandal is not merely that Cofnas and I encountered severe standards. It is that the standards appeared only when required—and disappeared when they became inconvenient.

Cambridge eventually concluded that Cofnas’s published views violated neither the law nor its own free-speech regulations. This vindication arrived with exquisite academic timing: after his Emmanuel College affiliation was already gone. The verdict pronounced him innocent; the machinery had already administered the sentence.

My experience was cruder. I repeatedly cited the institutions’ published commitments to freedom of expression. The University of Guelph, Humber College and Guelph-Humber responded with the eloquence of a locked filing cabinet. Not one official offered a substantive explanation of how those protections applied to me. They did not rebut my argument. They shunned the person making it.

The institutions proceeded as though their own policies were decorative Latin mottos and their human-rights obligations optional reading. Process was not followed so much as driven over.

The complaint advanced by Vice-Provost Melanie Spence-Ariemma—the senior administrator who helped initiate the proceedings against me—was, in my view, an incoherent catalogue of assertions, emotion and conclusions unsupported by evidence. Yet it was treated not as an allegation requiring proof but as a verdict awaiting paperwork.

The Muslim Students’ Association was offended. Wael Ramadan was offended. The DEI machinery had acquired its victim, and from that moment innocence became a procedural inconvenience.

Bill Rosehart, then the University of Guelph’s provost, terminated my employment without ever speaking to me. My hearing was cancelled. My appeals, I maintain, were not meaningfully considered. He has since become president of the University of Waterloo—a promotion that invites an awkward question about how rigorously universities investigate the judgment of those they appoint to investigate everyone else.

The continued employment of Spence-Ariemma raises an equally serious question. My allegation is not merely that she pursued the dismissal of someone who had condemned a terrorist organization, nor merely that she ignored evidence concerning Ramadan’s public statements about Jews and Israel. It is that the process she helped set in motion was accompanied by what I believe became a cruel and professionally devastating campaign of falsehoods.

Within hours of my suspension, a grotesque alternative explanation was reportedly moving from staff and faculty to students: that I had been arrested and that some hidden offence explained my removal. I possess contemporaneous evidence that this story was circulating. No administrator warned me, sought my account or publicly corrected it. In one of the few times they responded, they outright refused to deal with outright lies.

Falsehood had achieved what due process could not: a conviction without the tedious expense of a charge.

Meanwhile, academics who embodied a diversity narrative valuable to the institution appeared to receive patience, indulgence and protection unavailable to their critics.

That is the parallel.

Not that Jason Arday arranged Nathan Cofnas’s removal. He did not.

Not that the allegations concerning Arday and Ramadan are identical. They are not.

The parallel is the institutional culture: free speech treated as conditional, complaint procedures converted into political instruments, and nominally neutral standards applied according to the identity of the accused and the ideological usefulness of the accuser.

The policies remained equal. Only the people ceased to be.

The enormous difference

The Canadian story diverges from Cambridge because Cofnas succeeded in forcing the Arday controversy into public view.

Once major media organizations began examining the allegations, Cambridge could no longer treat the matter as an obscure internal problem. The spotlight became enormous. Cambridge opened investigations. Arday resigned while disputing the campaign against him.

Nothing remotely comparable has happened in my case.

There is an obvious reason. This is not Cambridge. I am a bit of a nobody. Outside of the National Post, major Canadian media is decidedly prejudiced against Israel. The CBC waxes lyrical about the indignity of a paramedic being fired for the grotesque accusation of the IDF luring and shooting toddlers but will not touch a man fired for condeming a designated terrorist organisation.

But Arday’s prominence made him an international story in a way that Ramadan was never likely to become.

The different levels of scrutiny may help explain the different endings.

Cambridge eventually had to look.

Two different endings

Nathan Cofnas was investigated for controversial speech. He then investigated Jason Arday. The resulting evidence attracted international attention, and the institutionally celebrated professor eventually faced renewed scrutiny and resigned.

My story ends differently.

I was investigated. I was suspended. I lost my academic employment. My complaints concerning the professor on the other side of the controversy were dismissed.

I am gone. Wael Ramadan is still there.

The free-speech policies are still there too—undisturbed on institutional websites.

Perhaps that is the real lesson connecting these very different stories.

Universities love free speech in the abstract. They write magnificent policies defending it. They establish committees devoted to it. They celebrate intellectual diversity in speeches and strategic plans.

But none of that tells us whether an institution actually believes in free expression.

There is only one meaningful test:

What does a university do when someone says something it desperately does not want to hear?

Free speech that protects only approved opinions is not free speech. It is decoration.

Public scrutiny forced Cambridge to confront allegations it had previously failed to resolve. If not for the media they would still be calling Arday a world class academic and gushing over him at well catered photo ops.

Right now I am in the unfortunate situation where my only legal representation is my union OPSEU 562, and because of their well-documented animus toward Jews and pro-Jewish voices, they have refused to represent me.

This is the Canadian system: ownership of your case can be retained by an authority that has officially aligned itself with their previous managerial adversary.

Like Cofnas, I do not expect my former position or reputation to be restored by the institutions that removed me. But accountability—not merely personal vindication—is still worth pursuing if universities wish to call themselves places of reason, fairness and free inquiry.

Below are a few of the verified posts that the University of Guelph and Humber College had no problem with.

The irony is that while all his posts are verified (there are hundreds more), the one post from me that condemned Hamas has been lost; there is only a student-altered version. So the man was fired with no evidence, while the guilty with abundant evidence was set free. The investigator lied about having a forensic copy of my post condemning Hamas; when pressed, she refused comment.

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Note: This essay shares personal anecdotes and comments on my lived experience and perhaps qualifies as research at Cambridge.

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