RANT: JUST A SHORT RANT

  

THESE DAYS, ONE THING I find particularly despicable are Canadians who go abroad and fight in foreign wars while serving in foreign militaries. I’m thinking specifically of those Canadians who go to Israel and join the IDF in its criminal endeavours in the Levant. I call these warmongers, ‘boutique genocide-enablers’. How else are we to characterize individuals who have no obligation to enlist yet travel to Israel for the express purpose of joining Israel’s wars of aggression in West Asia (Middle East). 

An interesting study by The Maple suggests most are young Jewish males who have attended Jewish schools in Canada, as well as summer camps, synagogues, rallies, promotional events and speaking tours, as well as school trips to Israel, and who come from traditional Jewish households (many from the Toronto region) where the survival of Israel is uppermost in the minds of their parents. These young men (mostly men) join for a temporary service in Israel’s IDF usually with their family’s whole-hearted support. In many cases family dynamics, school and community pressures help influence young Jewish Canadians to consider enlisting in Israel’s armed forces. Israel’s Law of Return stipulates that children born of a Jewish mother have the right to emigrate to Israel and automatically become Israeli citizens. However, this Right stipulates that returnees must serve up to 32 months in the Israeli Defence Force if they are between the ages of 18-25. Of course this comes with an extensive training phase, including Hebrew language classes before the recruit will participate in any active duty. (After 30-years of age, none are required to join Israel’s military.) Should the returnee, some in their teenage years, decide to apply for Israeli citizenship, then after they turn 18 years of age, as Israeli citizens, they are required to serve in the IDF. Israel has conscription for its entire popoulation, with only a few exceptions (religious or health reasons, for example).

 

👉IT SHOULD BE NOTED that Canada has strict laws governing the recruitment of Canadians into foreign militaries (the Foreign Enlistment Act). But that doesn't stop more subtle recruiting practices of Jewish NGOs. There are dozens of Jewish charities in Canada that raise funds for the state of Israel including ones that support Israel’s IDF directly like the Friends of the IDF or Beit Halochem Canada, the later supporting wounded IDF soldiers. There are dozens more. In 2020, a group of pro-Palestinian organizations in Canada accused the Jewish charity, Sar-El Canada, of violating Canadian law by recruiting Canadians to join Israel’s IDF as volunteers. The Courts eventually declined to take up the case because, they claimed, the possibility of a conviction was slim. They said such a charge was in the hands of independent law enforcement agencies like the RCMP, that also dropped its investigation of Sar-El, because it, too, could not make the case against the charity ‘stick’ under the Foreign Enlistment Act.

TODAY, there are approximately 1,500* IDF soldiers holding Canadian-Israeli dual citizenship passports 56 of whom are not Jewish and do not have Israeli passports. The later group are called “Lone Soldiers”. [A romantic name for latent psychopaths who get a buzz killing people. Just sayin’, Ed.] Altogether, there are six or seven thousand Lone Soldiers from around the world currently in the IDF who are non-Jews, or Jews who are orphaned or without Israeli family supports. So, to keep these mercenaries recruits from getting lonely, there are charities like Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Lone Soldier Centre that receive funding from other charities operating in Canada like the Canada Charity Partners (CCP) which funnels millions of dollars to Israeli causes.¹

IT’S SAFE TO SAY that Israel benefits from Canadian volunteers who, at the very least, perform logistical and administrative operations, freeing up IDF service members for other tasks (like bombing Gaza and Lebanon).  All, I might add, support Israel’s wars of aggression and its genocide in Gaza, its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and now southern Lebanon. Volunteers in Israel’s armed forces—for whatever reason—should know their service and activities as members in the IDF may someday come with charges of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. 

 

Young Persons, either naïve, idealistic supporters of Israel or those who have been cajoled by family and friends, or by local Israel support groups here in Canada, into joining Israel’s “seven-front” war, (as Israeli PM Benjimin Netanyahu calls his country’s terroristic rampage in West Asia) are at risk of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’² , so to speak, as they succumb to the rhetoric and twisted logic of racist Zionism. Their time with Israel’s army (“the most moral army on earth”, apparently) may, for them, become a dark and dangerous memory that scrapes to the surface like broken glass across bare flesh, resurrecting images forever engrained in their tormented and much embattled consciences.

 

SO, ON MY DESPICABLE LIST  I nail to the top of the board those individuals and organizations that inculcate, in Canadian youth especially, a blind obedience and subsurvience to Israel, a country that today practices genocide and ethnic cleansing upon its captive Palestinian population. It is also the country that has attacked and invaded its neighbours: Lebanon, southern Syria, and most dangerously, it has fomented a near 'hot' war  with Iran, and has, by-hook-or-by-crook, 'Espstein-ized' or not, coerced the United States president and a large swath of the American congress to direct the U.S. military to enter the fray on Israel's side. Most worringly, of course, is the fact that Israel is a nuclear Power, and there is a very good chance it may use its weapons of mass destruction in the near future, especially if things go pear-shaped for our erstwhile 'ally' in West Asia, the genocidal, apartheid settler-colonial state known as Israel. [see the Samson Option and Sy Hersh's book of the same name.] 

FRANKLY, I don't see Israel lasting another 78 years. I don't see it lasting another seven years if things keep going  the way they are.

 

👉WORLD OPINION has shifted in favour of the Palestinian resistence. Recently, several countries, including Canada, have issued embargoes on goods coming from Israeli businesses operating in the occupied West Bank, a small change and a performative act, to be sure, and on par with earlier sanctioning of several Jewish-Israeli settlers in the West Bank for violence against Palestinians living there. Nevertheless, it does lay down a marker of sorts, however tentative. 

👉On the other hand, revoking the "charitable" status of many of these Jewish and Israeli NGOs would be one way to put the kibosh³ on funnelling all that cash  and young Canadian bodies into a country (Israel) that, by its actions since October 7, 2023, and really since its founding in 1948, has  lost its right to be a member of the world community. But our politicians, including the current 'bottoms', like the Liberals, are gutless cupcakes and for the most part they go along to get along. 

👉It seems, our politicians wouldn't know a genocide even if one smacked them on the side of the head and stuffed them into ovens...😄😄😄.  

 

CHEERS, JAKE. ______________________________________  

* In 2220 that number was around 320.

    

1. So much so that critics call the CCP the “Canada-Israel-charity-pipeline”.

 

2. In 1979, in Guyana, Jim Jones, the leader of the People’s Temple movement, concluded the demise of his cult was imminent, so he served members Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Nearly 900 members (men, women and children) willingly committed mass suicide along with Jones. That’s were the expression “drink the Kool-Aid” comes from.

3. At least in would make donating to problamatic Israeli causes sting a little for rich Zionists here in Canada who currently claim such donations as 'charitable' deductions on their tax returns.  

 

[Interesting couple of articles here and here from the CBC on the flap caused by IDF soldiers going on a speaking tour in Canada called "Triggered: Combat to Campus--The Tour " in November 2025 Ed.]