Shaffiq Dar

Effective, experienced & efficient lawyer. My focus on personal service has rewarded me with many repeat clients, referrals and long term friendships.

[Shaffiq Dar @shaffiqdar]

I cannot understand how 77 million Americans voted for this buffoon

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Trump just posted this video featuring armed geese — all sporting what appears to be Trump-style hair.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Trump just posted this AI video of himself replacing the Lake Ontario sign with a “Lake America” sign.

I’ll never understand how 77 million people voted for this buffoon.

[Shaffiq Dar @shaffiqdar]

Donald Trump has apparently renamed Lake Ontario to be Lake America
So, in solidarity with our great neighbour’s new rebranding policy, I’ve renamed my toilet “Lake Trump" because just like it's namesake it is full of shit.

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Look for a moment at this photograph.
It is a small thing, a simple image, and yet within it lives an entire universe.

A father holds his young son in his arms. The child leans against him with the natural confidence of someone who believes the world is safe because his father is there. Both of them are smiling, and the strange miracle of love has given them the same smile, as if the joy of one face had quietly traveled to the other.

Behind them stands the mother.

She is there, close enough to see the happiness in their faces, close enough to be part of that quiet moment of ordinary life that so many families know. A father, a child, and behind them the silent presence of the mother who holds the world of that family together.

It is a gentle smile. An innocent smile.

Perhaps there is no word in any language more beautiful than innocence.

Innocence is the light that lives in the eyes of those who know nothing of war, nothing of armies, nothing of the terrible inventions by which human beings have learned to destroy one another. It is the quiet certainty of childhood, the serene belief that tomorrow will resemble today, and that life, like the sun, will simply rise again.

The child in this photograph possesses that certainty.

He does not know that somewhere on this same earth men have created machines capable of destroying such beauty in a single second.

But high above them, beyond the reach of their laughter, another decision was being made.

Somewhere in the sky, an Israeli soldier sat inside his aircraft. Within that machine, surrounded by instruments and weapons, a man may easily forget the fragile miracle of human life. Power has a dangerous habit of persuading those who hold it that they have been granted the authority of fate itself.

For reasons that even God Himself might struggle to understand, the soldier fired a missile.

And in a moment, the photograph became the last trace of two lives.

The missile killed the father. And it killed the child. The mother survived.

But she now lies in a hospital, in critical condition, suspended between life and death, between memory and silence.

Sometimes I wonder which suffering will weigh more heavily upon her.

Will it be the wounds she carries in her body today?

Or will it be the day she awakens, healed, and realizes that she must spend the rest of her life alone with this photograph?

For in that moment the image will no longer be a memory.

It will be a grave.

And yet what troubles my heart even more deeply is something strangely personal.

The name of this family is Shehab.
My name. The same name.

More than sixty members of the Shehab family have already been killed by the Israeli army.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether it was the same soldier who killed us in Gaza who has now killed us again in Lebanon.

Wars have a terrible way of repeating their crimes, as if violence itself were a voice echoing across borders.

And so the same question returns again and again, haunting the conscience of this world:

How many times must we be killed?
And in how many different places
before someone in this world finally decides
that enough is enough?

#WoundedGaza #lebanon

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

If someone were to ask me for one honest piece of advice, the kind that comes not from theory but from watching the world for too long, I believe I would answer quietly.

Do not have children.

Not because children are not beautiful.
Not because becoming a parent is not one of the most sacred acts a human being can choose.

But because this world, time after time, has shown that it does not know how to protect them.

When you live long enough, you begin to notice a pattern that is difficult to ignore.

Children do not only die on distant battlefields anymore.
They die in the places where they were supposed to be safe.

In classrooms, with pencils still in their hands.
In bedrooms, beneath blankets and cartoon posters.
In cribs, beside small stuffed animals that will wait forever for hands that will never return.

A toy remains on the floor.
A drawing lies unfinished on the table.
A schoolbag stands by the door, already prepared for tomorrow, a tomorrow that will never come.

It is a strange and terrible thing to realize that in our world the smallest bodies often carry the heaviest burden.

Children are buried before they have even had the time to understand what cruelty means.
A laugh disappears in a moment, and the silence that follows is heavier than any explanation.

We like to imagine that childhood lives under a kind of invisible protection, that there is some quiet law of the world that guards it.

But history tells another story.

Our century has become disturbingly efficient at destroying children.

In classrooms. In homes. In hospitals.
Sometimes even in the arms that were meant to keep them safe.

And perhaps the most unsettling truth is not only that this happens.

It is that it continues to happen.

Again. And again.

So if someone insisted on hearing one honest piece of advice, stripped of illusions and stripped even of hope, I believe I would say only this.

Do not bring children into a world
that has not yet learned
how to protect them.

#NoChildDeservesWar #WoundedGaza

[Dr. Omar Suleiman @omarsuleiman]

The war mongering pedophiles that brought you genocide in Gaza and the most scandalous files of abuse in history are now embroiling the world in a war to distract you in the name of “preserving freedom.”

Bombing a girls elementary school and killing over 30 young children is scratching the surface for these monsters. Truly sickening.

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Ramadan arrived this year, and for the first time in my life, my mother did not clean the house.

Not just any cleaning, but the ritual every Muslim family knows: washing the walls, rearranging the rooms, brushing away a year’s worth of dust as if we were preparing our souls before preparing the space.
This year, nothing happened.

Yesterday, I told her that some corners of the apartment needed thorough cleaning, that they might become a breeding ground for insects if we continued to ignore them. We had spoken about it many times before, and each time she and my sister refused without explanation. I thought I understood the reason, but I had never heard it spoken aloud.

Until yesterday.

With a voice that sounded as if something inside her was breaking, she said:

“This is not our home.
It will never become our home.
And I will not treat it as if it were.”

Five months ago, the Israeli army destroyed our house.
Since then, my mother has refused to return and see what remains of it. As for this small rented apartment, which we pay for only because we have nowhere else to go, she refuses to call it home. To her, it is nothing more than a temporary shelter, a waiting room between two lives her heart still cannot accept.

At first, I thought it was only emotion. Perhaps mothers cling to places more deeply than we men do. I expected my father to say something practical, something that would help her move forward.

But when I looked at him, waiting for reassurance, he said quietly, with a pain that filled the room:

“Every night I wake up in the middle of the night.
I look around and ask myself:
Why are we here?
Why aren’t we in our home?”

And in that moment, I realized something about myself.
I understood why, even now, when I write about this place in English, I cannot use the word home. I always write apartment.
As if language itself refuses to lie.
As if words know what we are trying to deny.

That was when I understood that war does not only destroy walls.
It destroys the very idea of belonging.
It turns families into tenants in their own lives, and strangers within their own memories.

We didn’t just lose a house.
We lost the word “home.”

#WoundedGaza

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

We’re buying Canadian, and we’re building Canadian.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

Today, Canada recognises the State of Palestine.

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

I have no voice left.
My throat is torn from screaming, my soul flayed raw.
I cursed Hamas for October 7, cursed them for dragging two million souls into the abyss, for their arrogance, for their marble rooms where they sat like princes while the people drank brackish water and the children died with flies in their mouths.
I begged them to stop, to beg for a truce, to save one single child, and they did nothing.
They chose their glory, their revolution, their flag, and they delivered us into the jaws of hell.

But look, look at what Israel is doing.
Do you dare call this war?
War is fought between armies.
War has rules. Here there are no rules.
Here there is only the machine, crushing bone, tearing flesh, leaving nothing behind but the smell of burnt hair and the wailing of women.
Here they are not killing Hamas, they are killing Gaza itself.
Every building is marked for death, every street for erasure.
The sky itself seems to agree, it rains fire until the city is ash.

Do you see what they are doing? They are trying to kill memory. When the last man leaves Gaza, there will be nothing to bury him under, no house, no mosque, no church, no school, no market.
Only sand and silence.
And perhaps one day the world will say: “There was nothing here. No one lived here.”

I am ashamed to still be alive. Ashamed that my stomach still hungers when children lie under the rubble.
Ashamed that I still have words, and these words cannot stop a single bomb from falling.

I no longer pray for justice, justice is a lie we told ourselves.
I only pray that the earth itself remembers.
That these ruins rise one day to testify against all of us, against Hamas, against Israel, against me, against you, and that their testimony will be so terrible that even God Himself will shudder when He hears it.

#GazaGenocide

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

Canada condemns Israel’s strikes in Qatar — an intolerable expansion of violence and an affront to Qatar’s sovereignty.

Regardless of their objectives, such attacks pose a grave risk of escalating conflict throughout the region, and directly imperil efforts to advance peace & security, secure the release of all hostages, and achieve a lasting ceasefire — efforts in which Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani plays a highly constructive role.

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

For days we have obeyed, as though obedience might purchase our right to live. We left Gaza City and went south, into the so-called “safe zone,” that bitter parody of salvation. But there is no salvation here.

Tonight the house beside us was chosen, chosen as if by some cosmic tribunal to be torn apart. And so we sit together in a single room, pressed so close we can hear one another’s hearts. The walls tremble with our silence. The air itself feels guilty for remaining still. We are no longer people; we are the condemned, awaiting the sound that will deliver the verdict.

There are no safe zones in Gaza. The whole of this land has been turned into a graveyard where the living walk. Every home is a coffin with its lid not yet shut. We do not live. Life has fled from us. We simply endure, suspended on the edge of a scream, waiting for the instant when light and sound and dust will rush in and erase us.

And if we die tonight, it will not be as martyrs or as soldiers, but as shadows passing wordlessly into the dark, proof that the world was watching and did not move.

#GazaGenocide

[The New York Times @nytimes]

In @nytopinion

“Keeping out the international media indicates that Israel’s leaders are trying to conceal the war’s full horror,” the editorial board writes. https://t.co/FVnaOG3F8E

[Toronto Star @TorontoStar]

Pope demands end to 'collective punishment' and forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza https://t.co/gnYgspXTGx

[The Globe and Mail @globeandmail]

Multiple journalists killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital https://t.co/0XgZDsTmJv

[Dr. Omar Suleiman @omarsuleiman]

Israel just bombed a hospital, then murdered the journalists covering the hospital bombing on live TV.

Mohammad Salama, Hossam Al-Masri, Muath Abu Taha, and Maryam Abu Daqqa worked for Aljazeera, Reuters, NBC, and the Independent.

What a mockery this genocidal machine has made of the world. Israel has shown it can gas people to death, annihilate them, and then kill the journalists covering that annihilation with zero consequences.

A failed world order. A failed world.

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

"The biggest crime is your silence"

From Gaza, Palestine

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

Canada has long been committed to a two-state solution — an independent, viable, and sovereign Palestinian state living side by side with the State of Israel in peace and security.

My statement on Canada’s recognition of a Palestinian state:

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

“Starving people to death is a diabolical way of waging war. It must end.” — Pope Leo to Netanyahu https://t.co/tWiKC7Z9x1

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Today I saw the face of what we’ve become: and it was buried in trash.

It was after the hospital. My hands still smelled of blood and iodine, as if I had just pulled death out of someone’s lungs. I stepped into the street not as a man walks, but as a shadow stumbles: worn, faceless, erased.

And then I saw them.
In the middle of the road.
Six souls. A family. Huddled together, not at the edge where the damned usually die, but in the heart of the road; as if they had taken position at the altar of some invisible God who no longer answers.

I should have turned away.

But curiosity is a wicked thing.
It’s not wonder; it’s hunger.
And sometimes, it eats you alive.

I walked toward them.
They were quiet. Too quiet.
A circle of bones and breath.

And there it was.

A meal.
Or what I thought was a meal.
A miracle, maybe, for a second.
But no.

It wasn’t food.
It was garbage.

A pile of trash.
Stinking. Festering. A graveyard of wrappers and waste.
And from that grave, they had scraped a few strands of spaghetti: cold, sticky, clinging to dirt as if ashamed to be eaten.

And then I saw him.

The father.
With hands no longer hands, but trembling instruments of despair.
He reached into the trash and lifted the food: not to eat, no, but to feed.

He fed it to his daughter.
A little girl.
Her eyes were too large for her face. Her lips, cracked. Her dress, torn like she had fallen through history itself.
And he fed her garbage, with love.

With tenderness.
As if it were soup.
As if it were gold.

He held it delicately.
Lifted it to her lips like a holy offering.
And she took it.
She chewed slowly.

She smiled.

And I…
I shattered.

Because in that moment, the universe reversed.
The sacred became foul.
The foul became sacred.
And I was no longer a witness;
I was a criminal.

How dare I exist?
How dare I walk upright while that child eats from the mouth of death?

I did nothing.

I stood there, paralyzed by the weight of my own uselessness.
I, who have words, hands, and breath, did nothing.

And worse: I walked away.

But no, that’s a lie.
I never left.
I am still there.

#GazaGenocide