Rob Graham

International business development professional. Now retired stray old fart. Former Canadian Foreign Service Officer. Lives in God's country.

[Rob Graham @RGAME2]

@JChimirie66677 How about Ghana, Nigeria and other successor states to the African empires and kingdoms that actually captured people and sold them on to European traders on the coast.

[dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ @DahliaKurtz]

Our veterans sacrificed their lives for this?

This doesn't just happen. This has been allowed to happen. This is by design.

How many more Remembrance Days do we have left before this day is entirely forgotten?

Volume up. Even if you don't speak Arabic, you'll understand.

[Barbara Kay @BarbaraRKay]

And who paid for that gigantic flag? Spontaneous protesters pooling their pocket change?

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

In 2013, a work of art was created on a beach in Normandy as a tribute to the roughly 9000 people who lost their lives there on D-Day.

Designed by the British sand artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss, it was made of 9000 human silhouettes raked into the sand at Arromanches, one for every soldier and civilian who died during the landings, and it was completed on 21 September, the International Day of Peace, with the help of hundreds of volunteers.

About 60 volunteers had signed up in advance, far too few for such a huge task, but on the day, people simply started turning up. Locals, tourists and strangers from around the world picked up rakes and stencils and joined in, racing the incoming tide. The artists made one decision that gave the whole work its meaning: there are no flags, no uniforms and no sides. The 9000 figures stand for Allied servicemen, German soldiers and French civilians alike, and in the sand they all look the same.

As the artists put it, they would be known only as "The Fallen."

D-Day remains the largest seaborne invasion in history: on 6 June 1944, after a day’s delay caused by bad weather, American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops landed on five beaches along the heavily fortified coast of Normandy, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. They stormed ashore under relentless German fire, and Omaha Beach became the deadliest of them all.

The exact number of those who died that day will never be known. The artists explained that 9000 is a conservative, rounded figure: around 3000 French civilians, 2000 German soldiers and 4414 Allied servicemen.

A few hours after the last silhouette was drawn, the tide rolled in and erased them all, exactly as the artists intended: a reminder of how quickly lives can be swept away, and how easily they can be forgotten. In Jamie Wardley’s words, the work was “a sobering reminder of what happens when peace is not present.”

[David Portier @davidportier]

so mega-woke Trudeau built a misogynistic immigration system that discriminates against women on an industrial scale.

[Kate Harrison @KatlynHarrison]

"Despite the public dismay conveyed by Carney and Joly Tuesday, sources said the federal government had been engaging directly with both companies, knew the terms of the proposed sale and did not stand in the way of it."

This sequel to the Gordie Howe Bridge sucks. #cdnpoli

[Dante Rossi @tvc1five]

On Remembrance Day, Mark Carney’s Liberal government permitted a large pro-Palestine protest with giant flags and chants outside Parliament Hill. This is the predictable result of his unpatriotic policies—mass immigration, weak borders, and prioritising foreign causes over Canadian veterans and national cohesion. Sacrificing remembrance for political correctness is a disgrace to those who died for this country. #ScumbagRatMarkCarneyMustGo

[Geoff Horsman @HorsmanGeoff]

Federally-funded science is also now prioritizing foreigners.

The Canada Impact+ program recruits from outside the country. There is no citizenship requirement.

Further, they typically require an ideological "commitment to [DEI] as fundamental principles guiding research".

[Jasmin Laine @JasminLaine]

Absolutely inappropriate... on Remembrance Day. the one day of the year our publicly funded national broadcaster should be laser-focused on Canadian veterans, Canadian history, and the sacrifices our troops made... what is CBC News Network running wall-to-wall coverage on?

Pete Hegseth being against DEI.

They’re bringing on American democrat political guests to rehash a failed impeachment vote against Pete Hegseth.

Think about the editorial priorities there: Canadian taxpayers pay over a billion dollars a year for a public broadcaster to tell Canadian stories, and on November 11th of all days, they’re acting like a low rent American cable channel obsessed with Trump administration drama. Disgraceful and Irrelevant to Canada

[Terry Newman @terrynewman]

I just sent an email to the Minister of Public Safety about Monday’s targeting of a warehouse in Saint-Laurent, a Montreal borough, by Palestine Action Canada, which claimed responsibility. The last time I reached out, I received a boilerplate response.

The group is listed as a terrorist organization in the UK and US.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

ISIS burned 19 Yazidi girls alive for refusing to convert to Islam and become sex slaves.

Not a single Muslim organized a march for them!

[Rob Graham @RGAME2]

@harrisonlowman Policy and pronouncement are two entirely different things...

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

November 11, 1673. Polish hussars broke into a fortified Ottoman camp at dawn, drove 35,000 men onto a single bridge over the Dniester, and then put artillery on the bridge.

Only a few thousand of them reached safety.

The man who commanded it found out the next day that the King of Poland had died, rode back to Warsaw, and got himself elected king on the strength of what he had just done.

The background is one of the most humiliating moments in Polish history, which is why what follows mattered so much.

In 1672 the Ottomans had invaded, taken the great fortress of Kamieniec Podolski, and forced the Commonwealth into the Treaty of Buchach, which ceded territory in Ukraine and committed Poland to paying annual tribute to the Sultan.

A tribute. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which a generation earlier had put a king on the Russian throne, was now paying protection money to Constantinople.

The Sejm refused to ratify it and voted money for an army instead.

In 1673 the Sultan could not get a field army together until autumn, and by the time Hüseyin Pasha's force was in position the campaigning season was effectively over. So the Ottomans were ordered into winter camps, and Hüseyin's army settled in around the fortress of Khotyn on the Dniester.

An army in winter quarters is an army that has stopped expecting to fight.

John Sobieski was Grand Hetman, the Commonwealth's senior field commander, and he moved fast. He crossed the Dniester and had about 30,000 men at Khotyn in early November.

The detailed breakdown of that force is worth reading, because it shows what a Polish army actually was: 1,670 hussars, 11,105 armoured cavalry, 5,828 dragoons, 1,619 Wallachian light horse, 342 arquebusiers, and about 8,500 infantry including a Hungarian contingent.

Look at the ratio. Roughly 20,000 cavalry to 8,500 foot. No other European army of the period was built like that.

Hüseyin had about 35,000, with Moldavian and Wallachian contingents, inside the fortress and a fortified camp built on the site of an earlier Polish entrenchment from the 1621 campaign.

On November 10, Sobieski made attacks that were really reconnaissance, to find out how the camp was laid out.

Then he kept them awake.

The Polish guns bombarded the camp all night, in a hard wind and severe cold, and the Ottoman troops spent the night under fire instead of sleeping. By dawn they were exhausted and freezing, and the Moldavians and Wallachians were already deciding they would rather be on the other side.

At first light Sobieski attacked in person.

A cannon salvo, then infantry and dragoons went at the ramparts and tore openings in them, and then the hussars came through the gaps under Hetman Jabłonowski.

The Polish winged hussar in 1673 was the last effective heavy shock cavalry in Europe. The lance was up to five and a half metres long, hollowed to keep the weight down, and it outreached anything an infantryman or another horseman could present. They were not shock troops in the sense of charging into a solid formation and hoping. They charged into formations that had already been opened up for them, which is precisely what happened here.

The sipahis counterattacked and could not hold them. The fighting went into the tents and the fortress.

Hüseyin ordered a withdrawal across the Dniester, and the only crossing was the bridge at Khotyn.

Polish artillery hit the bridge. It collapsed under the weight of the men on it.

Of 35,000, only a few thousand got away to Kamieniec Podolski. Polish accounts put Ottoman dead and wounded at 20,000 to 30,000, roughly two-thirds of the army, with the rest killed or captured. Commonwealth losses were about 2,000.

Those figures come from the winning side and are probably generous. The scale of the disaster is not in doubt.

They also took the fortress with large stores of food, munitions and artillery, and the Moldavian and Wallachian troops changed sides.

And here is the part that reads like fiction. King Michael Wiśniowiecki had died on November 10, the day before the battle. Sobieski did not know.

So the news reaching Warsaw was that the king was dead and that the Grand Hetman had just annihilated an Ottoman army.

He was elected King of Poland in May 1674.

What the victory did not do was end the war or recover Kamieniec Podolski, which stayed Ottoman until 1699. The Ottomans pulled back out of Poland proper but held most of western Ukraine, and the fighting continued to 1676.

What it did was restore the Commonwealth's standing in Europe and make Sobieski's name. The Turks called him the Lion of Khotyn.

Ten years later, in September 1683, he led the relief army to Vienna and commanded the largest cavalry charge in history down the slopes of the Kahlenberg into Kara Mustafa's camp.

He had already done exactly that, on a smaller scale, at Khotyn.

[Josh Ryan 🍁 @joshryanjames]

November 10th: Alexander Mercurio, who plotted ISIS jihadist mass style shootings, targeting all of the churches in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho has been sentenced to federal prison for 18 years. https://t.co/t3HJlpfX66

[spiked @spikedonline]

The Kraków shooting was not a ‘far right’ terror attack:
https://t.co/5Ow2dYIVdx

[Colby Cosh @colbycosh]

This (like the number of ESL students in some urban schools) is an unconditional reductio ad absurdum for Canadian immigration policy. If you get this outcome, the policy is wrong ipso facto!

[Barbara Bal @BarbaraBalCPC]

💥 Ok, this story is just getting weirder.

CTV News sources say the Carney government was “actively and intensively part of discussions” that led to Stellantis selling its Brampton plant to Roshel. They KNEW the terms of the proposed sale and did not stand in the way.

But yesterday Carney called it a “betrayal” of workers and of Canada, and Joly expressed disappointment.

⁉️ I have so many questions.

👉 WHY the public outrage when they were actively participating?
👉 WHY claim they “never advocated for a deal” when they were intensely involved for months?
👉 WHY did the initial opposition simply vanish?
👉 WHY feign surprise when they already knew the terms?
👉 WHY not take back the ~$24 million in taxpayer dollars that Stellantis offered to return?

NONE of this adds up.

[Rob Graham @RGAME2]

@HillelNeuer @AnitaAnandMP @nationalpost But she has a strong muslim vote in her riding, don't you know....

[RMC86 @RMC19861987]

🚗 The Stellantis fiasco in 1-minute.
💰 The Liberals (& Doug Ford) committed billions to Stellantis to upgrade their plants with no contracted job guarantees.
🕵️ Liberals secretly approved the sale of the Brampton plant to Roshel months ago.
😇 Now that the announcement is made, they fake indignation, call the sale a betrayal & defend Joly's work as "exceptional."
😡 Gross incompetence & shameless, barefaced lies.
🤠 And Carney doesn't have a (Gordie Howe bridge lie) cowboy hat excuse this time.
❓ What idiot would trust this government? Thx @cbcwatcher

[Rob Graham @RGAME2]

@MelissaLantsman Well, it's a divided and dangerous world...

[Melissa Lantsman @MelissaLantsman]

Yesterday, the Prime Minister and his Industry Minister told Canadians that they were shocked, appalled and betrayed, after sitting in on a dozen-plus meetings about the very thing that shocked, appalled and betrayed them.