Is there no end to the sins committed by Zionists? In a lengthy essay for the September issue of Harper’s magazine — “Minority Death Match: Jews, Blacks, and the ‘Post-Racial’ Presidency” — Canada’s own Naomi Klein establishes herself as the uncontested world leader in thinking up imaginative new sins to lay at the feet of Israel. Her new theory: Supporters of the Jewish state are not only responsible for imposing Apartheid on Palestinians, deliberately provoking terrorism in a bid to secure profits for Israeli defence industries, and destabilizing the Middle East, they are also undermining the African quest for slave-trade reparations.

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A lot of Political Mavens readers may instinctively suspect that Canada has lumped itself in with the chorus of nations denouncing Israel for defending itself against Hamas. Not so. To my surprise, both the Conservative government and the opposition Liberals (led by none other than former Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff) have laid blame for the conflict on Hamas and upheld Israel’s rights to protect its citizens.

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Canadians have a friend in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation columnist Heather Mallick — even if they don’t know it: Her latest column for the Ceeb’s web site is so appalling that it might finally convince whoever is elected on October 14 to clean house at the state-financed broadcaster.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a column for the National Post arguing that readers will miss the mainstream media when we’re gone. Oh sure, bloggers have a lot of spicy opinions. But when it comes to investigating important stories, they don’t hold a candle to big, deep-pocketed, old-fashioned newspaper writers and broadcast media outlets.

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In late 1945, just months after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union sent its powerhouse Moscow Dynamo soccer club to play a series of exhibition matches against English teams. The tour was supposed to help solidify Anglo-Soviet relations. But the effect was the opposite: The games featured fist-fights, foul play, allegations of stacked rosters, and churlish crowds. After four matches, the Dynamo packed up and went home early, with national tempers rubbed raw on both sides.

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There were a lot of coherent reasons to oppose the Iraq war — it would kill a lot of people, it would empower Iran, it would create a haven for terrorists. But none of these anti-war rationales got much ink compared to that single bumper-sticker slogan: No war for oil. On Google, the phrase “war for oil” gets hundreds of thousands of hits. Most are attached to articles that make the claim — still widely believed in anti-war circles — that the 2003 invasion was part of some sort of grand Cheney-abetted corporatist conspiracy to pad the balance sheets of American oil companies.

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Great story from NPR this week about the freakishly high number of American presidents who are left-handed. If you add in Obama/McCain (both of whom are lefties), five of the seven most recent U.S. presidents will be left-handed (as of January, 2009).

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Christopher Hitchens is the finest English-language opinion writer in the world right now. That�s because he is (a) a polymath, (b) utterly passionate about all his opinions � from defending the Iraq war to denouncing snooty waiters, (c) an insanely hard worker, who pumps out a book a year, even as he writes lengthy book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly, and regular columns for Slate and daily newspapers, and (d) a strangely compelling stylist, despite (or perhaps because of) his fondness for esoteric, paragraph-length autobiographical digressions.

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Since the war in Iraq began, dozens of U.S. military deserters have come to Canada. Thanks to the Federal Court of Canada, that trickle may soon become a flood. The court’s decision in the case of Joshua Key — rendered on Friday — has so thoroughly dumbed down the criteria for refugee status in Canada that it is hard to think of any foreign combat veteran who would not be able to gin up a passable tale of woe.

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Can Canada’s mail carriers be trusted to deliver the mail to Israel’s embassy in Ottawa, its consulate in Toronto, or any other location affiliated with the Jewish state?

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Neal M. Sher posted to this site yesterday about the UN Human Rights Council’s decision to appoint anti-Israel activist Richard Falk as its “special rapporteur” on the Palestinian territories. But it wasn’t until today that I actually read, in detail, the Princeton University professor’s views on Israel — as encapsulated in this charmingly titled 2007 article “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust.”

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I see that Tibet is aflame, with at least 100 people dead in street protests.

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Three years ago this week, George W. Bush delivered his second inaugural address — a speech containing the purest distillation of his worldview ever set to words.

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Scratch the surface of Scientology and you will find a lot of weird and wild tidbits. To name but a few: The high school science-class “electro-psychometer” used to probe the bodies of new recruits for “hidden crimes,” the requirement that members are made to pay cash for their supposed enlightenment, the Buzz Lightyear-like code words embedded in the mountain of vacuous bureaucratic bafflegab set out by founder L. Ron Hubbard, the creepy measures used to enforce internal discipline (presided over — I am not making this up — by an “Office of Special Affairs”) and the lurid science-fiction plot line that governs the religion’s mythology at its most esoteric levels — involving a pan-Galactic alien ruler named Xenu who summoned billions of humans to our planet 75 millon years ago and then blew them up with atom bombs … after stacking their bodies around volcanoes for some unknown reason.

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The clash of civilizations we’re living through is widely seen as a battle between Islam and Christendom. I’m convinced it’s more basic than that. The reason Iraq and Afghanistan remain unsettled battlefields isn’t that our two civilizations can’t agree on the nature of God. It’s because we can’t agree on the nature of man.

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My post yesterday about the “eyebrow-cocking” tenets of Mormonism earned me a few interesting emails — including this one, from Scott Gordon, President of a California-based Mormonism-defense group called FAIR. In the interests of presenting both sides, here is his note:

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Lately, Christopher Hitchens has been a one-man hit squad against Mitt Romney. As anyone who’s read Hitchens’ best-seller God Is Not Great can attest, the guy hates all religions. But he has an especially buzzy bee in his bonnet about Mormonism. (Check out Chapter 11 of God Is Not Great — which is blistering on the Church of Latter Day Saints and its founders, even by the caustic standards established in the rest of the book.) Hitchens has recently written several pieces about Romney on Slate. The latest, appropriately titled Mitt Romney’s Windy, Worthless Speech, can be found here. But it was in an earlier Nov. 26 Slate piece where he made what I thought was his most effective and scathing criticism of both Romney’s faith and the man’s involvement in it:

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Great story out of Toronto: An ordained United Church minister named Joanne Sorrill wanted to get a personalized Ontario license plate that read REV JO. But this was rejected by the authorities on the grounds that it might promote dangerous driving. So instead, she opted for the full-blown REVRNDJO. But this, too, was rejected because the ministry was scared it might signal a preference for Christianity over other religions.

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My Monday post on Ann Coulter (which I subsequently turned into a National Post column) yielded an unusually large volume of email feedback from readers. Roughly half the correspondents embraced my view of Coulter as a freaked-out rageaholic. The other half accused me of being a liberal who doesn’t understand Coulter’s brilliant and hilarious deconstruction of modern leftism.

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Last week, during an appearance on the CNBC program The Big Idea, right-wing shock-pundit Ann Coulter described her ideal vision of American society. It was, she said, New York City, as the city appeared in the midst of its 2004 Republican national convention: “People were happy. They’re Christian. They’re tolerant.”

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Over the summer, when Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in Canada promoting her new book about the atrocities she’d endured in the name of Islam, she ended up on Avi Lewis’ CBC television talk show, On The Map. The result, recorded for posterity on the Web, was one of those over-the-top examples of left-wing bias that critics of the national broadcaster (Canada’s equivalent to the BBC) are forever mass-forwarding to one another. The biggest whopper came when Ali — who’d endured both genital mutilation and forced marriage before escaping to the Netherlands — explained one of the key reasons her early life was so hellish: Whereas the Koran invades every aspect of life in Muslim countries, Western Christians respect the line between church and state.

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For the next 700 words or so, forget airplane crashes, terrorist attacks and earthquakes. There is plenty of bad news out there. But get past the front page, and you occasionally stumble on a story that puts things in perspective. The human condition, it turns out, is not so grim.

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I have just finished watching Britney Spears’ much-talked-about comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards this week. I don’t usually go in for that sort of gaudy thing. But in this case, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The New York Post seemed to suggest it was the most disastrous pop performance ever staged, and even resorted to scatology to describe the fallen pop stars’ dance moves. If even the eggheads at Slate are writing about how awful and lugubrious Britney’s dancing was, I figured there had to be something of interest going on here.

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There is a terrible story out of West Virginia this week: A family/gang of West Virginians near the town of Logan is accused of kidnapping a local black woman and keeping her imprisoned in a mobile home for a week while they raped and tortured her. The fact that two of the accused are mother and son, and another two are father and daughter, make the whole thing even more sick. One local cop said it was the worst thing he’d seen in more than 30 years on the job.

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In 2004, a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg uploaded his university’s student directory to the Web. He then invited fellow undergrads to use the database to catalog their campus friendships. The idea, Zuckerberg explained, was to chart relationships – to map, as he put it, everyone’s “social graph.”

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Remember the name Criste Reimer. I predict you’ll be hearing it a lot in coming years.

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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the end of the 2006 Lebanon War. In strictly numerical terms, it was a tiny conflict. Fewer than 2,000 people died, a tiny fraction of the number killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor did the war result in any territory changing hands, or the regional balance of power shifting permanently in a significant way. But the battle will nonetheless be remembered as an important milestone in the Long War between the West and militant Islam. While the Taliban and al-Qaeda are alienating their would-be followers with nihilistic violence, Hezbollah has developed a far more complex strategy that combines terrorism with sophisticated guerilla warfare, state-of-the-art weaponry, savvy public relations, charismatic leadership and state sponsorship. In fact, the group’s surprisingly strong effort a year ago highlighted at least a half-dozen important innovations in Islamist war-making:

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The worst professor in North America has been fired. Yesterday, regents of the University of Colorado voted 8-1 to dismiss Native American activist and ethnic-studies “scholar” Ward Churchill. This is the same Ward Churchill who famously described the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” who’d been targeted as a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”

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Less than six years after 9/11, the great Clash of Civilizations has fizzled out. It’s been replaced by a civil war within a single civilization.

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