Had a terrible experience with the print department at Staples. When I emailed a complaint, I got this in response. They couldn’t even fill out the form letter correctly! @StaplesCanada
@StaplesCanada I did all of that - and the response I received was what was highlighted in my post. And I’m *still* waiting for my printed material after been assured two different times it would be at the Leaside store today. The complaint should already be filed into your system.
@clharrington024 What was this video used to teach? Unclear. Flocabukary has some excellent videos. I used one on similes and metaphors for my grade 4/5s that was a great 2 minute hook.
Some days you can’t love social media enough. This is one of those days. It began like this. Someone stole 12 tons of KitKats.
And then the replies started coming in. Scroll down.
@whotown@MargaretAtwood This just came to my attention as I’m reading her new biography- too bad- I thought she had more nuanced opinions about Israel. That one hurts!
There is a genre of October 7 commentary that works by constructing a historical arc so compressed and so selective that the conclusion becomes inevitable. A people wronged, hemmed in, their world dismantled across generations. Rage follows. What else would you expect?
The history offered in support of this arc is not really history. It begins where it needs to begin, omits what complicates it, and arrives at a destination that was chosen before the argument started.
The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine never held sovereignty that was taken from them. There was no state. A significant portion immigrated to the land only in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The land passed from Ottoman to British control, and two national movements competed within that framework. One of them, the Jewish national movement, was not a colonial project arriving from outside. Jewish communities had existed without interruption in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Gaza, Tiberias, the Galilee and elsewhere, through centuries of pre-modern colonial empires, Roman, Byzantine, several Arab Caliphates, the Crusaders, and Ottoman, and long before any of them emerged.
The Zionist movement was a national liberation movement of a people with three thousand years of documented connection to that land, rejecting the exile that was imposed on many of them, and building upon a presence that had never left.
The other national movement, the Arab Palestinian one, crystallised largely in reaction to Zionism rather than predating it, which is why the sovereign state being projected backwards into history as ancient and continuous is itself part of the inversion, not a foundation for it. Arab leaders, who rarely called themselves Palestinians then and most of whom saw themselves as part of greater Syria, rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947. That rejection, and the violence that accompanied it across the three decades of the Mandate period, is precisely what this genre of argument leaves out.
What does the enforcing are films like "Palestine 36," marketed as historical drama about the bloody Arab Revolt, but functioning as something closer to historical replacement. They strip Jewish indigeneity and continuity from the record, recast a people with millennia of connection to that land as recent colonial arrivals, and present the conflict as a simple story of indigenous resistance to foreign imposition.
The purpose is not to inform Western audiences about a complex national conflict. It is to recruit them to a conclusion: that Jews and Israel are an illegitimate implant in the region, that the appropriate remedy is dismantlement, and that what would follow, the imagined state from the river to the sea, would be a tolerant, secular, democratic alternative, where Jews can live in peace under their Arab Palestinian Muslim rulers, not as a national group but as a religious minority.
That last part is perhaps the most dishonest element of the entire narrative. The movements driving that agenda in the Middle East are neither democratic nor secular, and whatever secular veneer some of them maintain is precisely that, a veneer. The model being implicitly promised has no precedent among Muslim-majority states in the region, and sits in direct and unacknowledged tension with the political and religious character of the organisations whose cause these films are made to serve, like Hamas.
Without all of this, October 7 cannot be made to look like the inevitable product of accumulated injustice. It looks instead like what it was: a brutal, sadistic rampage by Arab Palestinian Islamist terrorist organisations, and the civilians who joined them, to murder, rape, and kidnap Israeli citizens, residents, and foreign nationals. No historical narrative, however artfully constructed, changes what happened that morning. It only changes who the audience is willing to hold responsible for it.
This is the genre James represents, and he is far from alone in it. It is not engagement with history. It is the use of a selective version of it to launder a conclusion that was held before the argument began.
@JimMcMurtry01 The sad part is the money is often used for causes the union members do not support. Unions dues for over and above the interest their members doing their job should be optional .
BREAKING NEWS: The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law Secures Landmark Settlement Requiring UC Berkeley to End Discriminatory “Anti-Zionist” Boycotts and Prevent Campus Anti-Semitism
The settlement mandates rescission of discriminatory law school bylaws, prohibits student organizations from excluding Zionists regardless of speech topic, use of IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, anti-discrimination training, stronger discipline, and enhanced protections for Jewish and Israeli students.
For more information, read the full Press Release: https://t.co/5Aa7jKv0dm