Where local collaboration is absent, foreign intervention imposes enormous costs or simply stalls. Where it exists, intervention can succeed with surprising velocity, writes Pablo Policzer.
https://t.co/JnGMtFmvCO
“The expansion of humanitarian law has, in practice, shifted the horizon of strategic possibility.”
Read Pablo Policzer’s piece in COMPACT: https://t.co/YZstU2rY3W
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 9, 2025
Montreal, Québec
Rabbi Saul Emanuel: Holocaust Monument Desecration Is the Direct Result of a Culture of Incitement
The defacement of Canada’s National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa is not an isolated act of vandalism. It is the inevitable outcome of a culture that increasingly tolerates the distortion of Jewish history and the delegitimization of Jewish identity.
This monument was built to honour the memory of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It is a site of solemn remembrance and moral reckoning. To deface it is to desecrate not only a national memorial but the very notion that Jewish suffering deserves respect, that Jewish lives have meaning, and that truth must be preserved against the tide of ideological convenience.
We are told that antisemitism today is merely a reaction to geopolitical events. That is a dangerous fiction. Those who chant for violence, who smear Israel with grotesque and false accusations, and who direct their hostility at Jews in Canada are not expressing political critique. They are perpetuating the oldest hatred in new and fashionable forms.
This defacement did not emerge from nowhere. It is the result of weeks and months of public discourse that has excused hatred so long as it is framed as activism. When antisemitic slogans are painted as political speech, when Jewish institutions are turned into protest sites, and when lies about Israel are repeated without consequence, acts like this become not only possible but inevitable.
We call on Canada’s leaders—political, cultural, and academic—to speak with moral clarity. Not with abstractions, not with euphemisms, but with the conviction that some lines are not meant to be blurred. The memory of the Holocaust is not a blank canvas onto which others may project their anger.
And to our fellow Jews across Canada, let this be a moment of clarity. We do not exist on anyone else’s terms. We do not seek permission to remember our dead, to tell our story, or to defend our communities. We carry the burden of memory because it is ours, and we will not allow it to be hijacked, defaced, or forgotten.
Rabbi Saul Emanuel
Executive Director
Jewish Community Council of Montreal
A new paper by Antonio Quiñones and Pablo Policzer explores the security and governance crisis in Colombia’s hydrocarbon sector, where oil theft is the result of structural weaknesses in the state shaped by exclusion and inequality.
Read it tomorrow on https://t.co/zCUQoS2Jxz.
Allende's Chile could have become the South Korea or Taiwan of Latin America. That's the crux of my interview in today's La Vanguardia. On matters of industrial strategy, it had the right approach - *and* it was a democracy, unlike so many of the Asian "miracles." A thread: 🧵⬇️
@tomaspueyo Wait, Catholicism is ruled out because the population spike is recent, but instead the explanation is geography? Weren’t the fertile soils always present?