In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency.

America’s Growing Isolation

To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results.

Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

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The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the Internet.

As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.

From all accounts, in other words, the Five Eyes collaboration remains as robust as ever. As if to signal that fact, FBI director Christopher Wray offered a rare acknowledgement of its ongoing existence in October 2023 when he invited his counterparts from the FVEY countries to join him at the first Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California, a gathering of business and government officials committed to progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Going public, moreover, was a way of normalizing the Five Eyes partnership and highlighting its enduring significance.

Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia

The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”

That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.

Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation — the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: there is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.

Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But — get this — to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs — a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the UK designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.

Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.

Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies — far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries — the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.

Unintended Consequences

It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities — the encirclement of China above all else — while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.

However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion — and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

The nonbinding resolution, which Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said her government would abide by, was spearheaded by the New Democratic Party. The NDP is a small social democratic party headed by Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh Canadian and the first Indo-Canadian to head a national party. It has 25 seats in a parliament of 338. The ruling Liberal Party is in coalition with the NDP and needs its support. In parliamentary systems, if the largest party doesn’t quite have a majority, it seeks a partner to get its vote count to 51% so that it can rule and reliably pass legislation. That arrangement gives the smaller party enormous sway, since if it walks away from the deal, the government falls and there are new elections.

The NDP website quoted NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Heather McPherson as saying last week before the vote: “New Democrats have been calling for a ceasefire for nearly six months – but the horror in Gaza continues, and we are further away from peace and an end to occupation than we have ever been. At least thirteen thousand Palestinian children have been killed in a war that the International Court of Justice says might be genocide – and Canada does nothing to stop it. The children of Gaza are traumatized and starving to death. These children are not Hamas.”

She said the party has received half a million messages from Canadians upset about the way Israel is prosecuting its war on Gaza.

She isn’t wrong. Already last November a poll showed that 71% of Canadians wanted a ceasefire in Gaza. And among young Canadians 18-34, about half see Israel as “a state with segregation similar to Apartheid.”

So the NDP are not leftist outliers on this issue. They represent a supermajority of the Canadian public on this issue. It is the Liberals and the conservative parties who are out of step.

At one political event in February, Singh deplored Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism and antisemitism. He was challenged by a Palestinian Canadian who complained that Singh had not specifically called out anti-Palestinian racism and who also complained about horribly insensitive things outgoing British Columbia minister Selina Robinson had said about Gaza, calling it “a crappy piece of land with no one on it.”

Singh replied, according to The Eyeopener, “It was harmful. There’s no question about it. In terms of the Palestinian racism, you’re absolutely right. I have often said that, but today, in my response I did not… It’s not just Islamophobia and antisemitism. But there’s very clearly, specifically, what should be deemed as anti-Palestinian racism that exists as well.”

The NDP motion was modest in its gains. They did get a ban on new arms sales and military technology transfers, on the grounds that Canadian law forbids weapon sales to countries if they might be used contrary to Canadian law. In essence, the vote endorsed the finding of the International Court of Justice on January 26 that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Hindustan Times Video: “NATO Founding Member Halts Arms Supplies To Israel Amid ‘Genocidal’ War On Gaza | Details”

Canada only sells Israel on the order of $21 million in arms a year, a tiny amount given that Israel’s arms purchases are in the billions.

Moreover, several key provisions that the NDP had pushed for were dropped, including the Canadian recognition of a Palestinian state, and the suspension of “all trade in military goods and technology with Israel.” That language, which was modified, would have halted not just new arms transfers but existing arms deals made last fall.

The Liberal Party, like the Democratic Party in the United States, has strong commitments to Israel, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly had pushed for even softer language, attempting to continue to allow technology transfers with military implications, but the NDP refused. As it was, three Liberal MPs of a Zionist orientation voted against the measure and say they are reconsidering their future with the party.

Some journalists are calling the resolution a nothingburger. They are wrong. An Indo-Canadian voice, sympathetic to Palestinians, was heard in Canada in an unprecedented way. The white Canadian establishment would not have passed this resolution. Further, the Canadian left made its voice heard, forcing the Liberals to take a stand when they really would have preferred not to.

Moreover, despite its low-key approach to world affairs, Canada, a country of 40 million, is important. It has the tenth-largest gross domestic product in the world, ahead of Russia, Mexico and South Korea. It is a NATO member. It is much more important than people tend to think.

For this reason, the real issue for Israel is not the potential loss of a paltry $21 million in arms this coming year. It is the possibility that other countries will be emboldened by what happened in Ottawa to take the same step. It is the clear conclusion that South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice against Israel for genocide is reverberating around the world. And it is the possibility that Jagmeet Singh is the future of Canada and perhaps of a new multicultural North that will be much less sympathetic to the white nationalist project of militant Zionism.

She went on to say, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry my friends, there would be no Canada the next day, right, right? But think about that, that is a natural reaction. You have a right to defend yourself and to make sure it never happens again, and that is Israel’s right.”

She has since apologized for a “poor choice of words,” not in her full-throated advocacy of genocide but for making Canada the scenario for it. She momentarily forgot that it is only allowed to advocate ethnic cleansing of non-white people. The Gaza conflict is like a UV black light for detecting sociopaths.

There are many things wrong with Hochul’s remark. First, Gaza is recognized by the UN and most countries in the world as an occupied territory over which Israel is the occupying power. It isn’t an independent country. It has no port, airport, or heavy armaments. It is almost completely surrounded by Israel, including from the sea and the skies, and even the Egyptian checkpoint of Gaza is de facto controlled by Israeli policy. Israel has the basic right of self-defense, as do all United Nations member states under its charter. But it doesn’t have the right to wage a total war, to wipe out 30,000 people in Gaza, the bulk of them innocent non-combatants, or to ethnically cleanse 1.9 million people. It has a right to defend itself from the Hamas organization, but not to destroy Gaza. As an occupying power it has a special responsibility to ensure the welfare of the Palestinian non-combatants of Gaza, a responsibility it has abandoned with glee.

NBC News Video: “Humanitarian crisis growing in Gaza”

Second, who in the world says things like “there would be no Canada the next day’? It is never all right to wipe out a whole people. The technical term for that sort of thing is genocide. As an Irish-American, Hochul should be more sympathetic to people being starved by impersonal colonial policy. The British rulers of Ireland during the potato famine believed that distributing food would backfire by making the locals forever dependent on this state largesse, setting them up for more deaths in the future. Nobelist in economics Amartya Sen debunked this theory, versions of which we hear from Republicans today. The only way to stop a famine is for the government to intervene to distribute food. The British also exported food from Ireland while a million were dying of hunger. There were 8 million Irish in 1840. A million died in the famine and a million left, many for the United States and Canada, leaving 5.8 million by 1860 or so.

Israel’s position in Gaza is no less colonial than Britain’s was in Ireland. Today, the Israeli authorities are imposing widespread hunger and thirst on millions of noncombatants, including small children. These policies are not necessary to combat Hamas, they are clearly undertaken for their own sake, as a form of collective punish. One physician who recently volunteered there wrote in the LA Times, “it wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”

The final thing that is wrong with what Hochul said is that we already had a war with Canada, when it was still part of the British Empire, in 1812-1814. The British provoked US ire by trying to restrict its trade with the Napoleonic Empire. American Gen. George McClure burned a Canadian town, and the British forces came down from Canada with First Nations auxiliaries and destroyed a number of American hamlets and towns, and then burned Buffalo, New York (Hochul’s home town) to the ground.

The US Constitution Museum explains,

“American armies invaded Canada in 1812 at three points, but all three campaigns ended in failure. One army surrendered at Detroit at the western end of Lake Erie, a second army surrendered at Queenston Heights at the other end of the lake, and a third army withdrew after little more than a skirmish north of New York. A similar multi-pronged invasion went better in 1813, but only in the West.”

So the 500,000 Canadians weren’t wiped out by the much more populous Americans, and except in the west they fought the U.S. forces to a standstill.

In the aftermath, the British forces invaded Washington, D.C. and burned the White House, the Capitol and the navy shipyard.

So Hochul’s genocidal fantasy doesn’t even accord with history.

Just as it wasn’t possible for the US to polish off British Canada in 1812-1814, it likewise isn’t possible for Israel to polish off the world’s 14.3 million Palestinians, however much its Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, might like to do so.

Politicians who glory in a whole nation abruptly “not existing” should be understood as disturbingly abnormal, and people should stop inviting them to dinner, much less electing them to high office.

(The Conversation) – During Ramadan, a man attacked a mosque in Markham, Ont. He allegedly yelled slurs, tore up a Qu’ran, and attempted to run down worshippers in his vehicle.

Some people on Twitter have raised the idea that the attacker was connected to Hindu extremist groups; however, the investigation is still ongoing.

This is one of two hate-motivated incidents at mosques in Markham in a week. Although police said they don’t believe the incidents are connected, as a researcher of online extremism I can theoretically link these events to a global trend of Islamophobic violence.

Legal discrimination and violence

From the United States’ Muslim ban, to India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, to Québec’s Bill 21, Muslims face legal discrimination globally.

The Quebec City Mosque attack happened Jan. 29, 2017. [Graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi]

Alongside these laws, Muslims face physical violence. This includes: the beating, lynching and burning of Muslims in India, the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019, the Québec City mosque shooting in 2017, and more recently the murder of the Afzaal family in London, Ont.

Collectively, these policies and killings demonstrate a transnational quality of Islamophobic prejudice and violence.

While the two incidents in Markham may not be directly linked to extremist groups, they have occurred within this global ecosystem of Islamophobia. To me, the attacks indicate that these online conspiracies do not occur in a vacuum and can have potentially horrifying real consequences.

Hindutva-based terrorism in Canada

Over the last several years, I have carefully examined the digital and transnational connections between white supremacists in North America and far right Hindu nationalists in India.

My preliminary findings show how these two seemingly unrelated extremist far-right groups have become increasingly allied on social media platforms as they position Muslims as a “common enemy.”

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing Hindu nationalist organization, promotes the Hindutva ideology which believes India only belongs to Hindus.

A recent published report by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organization documents how this organization has gained ground in Canada. Jasmin Zine is a Canadian scholar whose recent report also outlines a network of Hindu nationalists that aids in the circulation of ideologies that promote Islamophobia.

Governments spreading misinformation

In 2014, the BJP, the most prominent Hindu nationalistic right-wing party in India came to power. Like the RSS, the BJP and other Hindu nationalist parties believe that India belongs only to Hindus.

Since elected, the BJP has actively spread misinformation and conspiracies about Muslims through social and mainstream media, intensifying hostilities between Muslims and Hindus.

While seemingly different on the surface from white supremacy, my research shows how these two movements similarly mobilize emotional rhetoric and visual content to spread their influence.

Twitter, as one of the main platforms for both groups, has been used extensively to perpetuate new forms of gendered Islamophobia and to forge surprising alliances and affinities.

The Love Jihad conspiracy

One of the conspiracy theories shared by these groups is called Love Jihad. Originating in India by Hindu nationalists in 2013, this conspiracy alleges Muslim men actively seduce non-Muslim women to marry and convert them to Islam.

The #LoveJihad hashtag was quickly picked up on social media by white extremists and other Islamophobic groups in North America, modulating it to fit their own conspiracies such as The Great Replacement.

This example demonstrates how anti-Muslim sentiment online spreads quickly and transnationally.

Groups I monitor on Twitter from India constantly talk about the perceived threat of Love Jihad. One such Hindu nationalist group, Hindu Jagruti Org, warns Hindu women against “dangerous, sexually aggressive” Muslim men. The tweet below is an example:

O Hindu girls, remember that Jihadis consider Hindu women as objects to fulfil their lust #LoveJihad #5thHinduAdhiveshan

— HinduJagrutiOrg (@HinduJagrutiOrg) June 24, 2016

These tweets portray Muslim men as “deceitful, sexual monsters” who view Hindu women as “objects to fulfill their lust.” Hindu extremists argue that to combat these “Muslim monsters,” precautionary measures are needed.

#LoveJihad travels to North America

The #LoveJihad conspiracy was quickly taken up by Islamophobic groups in North America. For example, Robert Spencer, who runs Jihad Watch which has a large following among Hindu nationalists, tweeted the following:

Love Jihad in India: Five Cases of Muslim Men faking Hindu Identities to Lure and Trap Hindu Women https://t.co/lzbn2vJhXU pic.twitter.com/npmSvrKz4c

— Robert Spencer (@jihadwatchRS) August 8, 2021

The tweet includes an article that claims the Islamic State encourages Love Jihadis to target non-Muslim women and “abduct,” “forcibly convert, and marry” them.

Love Jihad has been proven a farce.

Yet, Spencer continues to claim there are “real cases that show how Muslim men have duped Hindu women into toxic romantic relations year after year.”

Responses from users to Spencer’s post demonstrate his success in establishing #LoveJihad as fact. For instance:

As these posts indicate, Love Jihad easily reinforces belief in Muslim men as “terrorists” and “groomers” — that is, men who create trust with girls and young women in order to exploit them.

Transnational alignment of hate

This shared intense hatred of “monstrous” Muslim men brings Hindu and white extremists into a “transnational affective alignment.” That is, the mutual hate of Muslims and a mutual love for Hindu and white national ideals.

Social media platforms such as Twitter are important in creating these alignments and perpetuating related conspiracies, gaining considerable traction through their repetition.

This alignment is produced through the demonization of Muslim men and extremists’ shared hate and fear of them across borders. Through transnational responses and retweets, extremists forge a layered and cumulatively condensed affective message: Muslim men are dangerous. We fear them. Thus, we hate them.

While it remains to be seen whether or not the recent mosque attackers were directly influenced by online, transnational and affective Islamophobia, recurring incidences such as this should remind us that hate does not abide by international borders.

Misinformation and conspiracies find fertile ground in the echo chambers of social media.

Our response to such crimes — and their online equivalents — must consider that the fear and hate of Muslims does not happen by accident.

As the #LoveJihad conspiracy demonstrates, strange bedfellows are easily made when there is a perceived common enemy. Conspiracies and acts of anti-Muslim hate impact us all.

Zeinab Farokhi, Assistant Professor (limited term appointment), Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – The German government and NGOs have welcomed the first G7 commitment to concrete targets for the rollout of renewables, but environmentalists also warned that the rich nation’s inclusion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) could lead to a “huge greenwashing show”. Following a meeting of climate, energy and environment ministers, German environment minister Steffi Lemke said the G7 countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the U.S. bear a special responsibility for solving the climate crisis given their resource consumption and the associated damage to the climate. “The G7 met this responsibility, which is also an obligation,” she said.

Energy and climate state secretary Patrick Graichen also said the G7 environment ministers took “the right path” for climate protection, and sent “the right signals” to partner countries outside the G7 on the way to COP28, and to decision-makers in business and society. “But in order to achieve our goals, we need to step up the pace and mobilise the necessary investments.”

At their meeting in the Japanese city of Sapporo, the G7 ministers for the first time agreed on joint targets for the expansion of renewable energies: 150 gigawatts expansion for offshore wind, and a combined solar capacity of more than 1,000 GW of photovoltaics by 2030.

They also committed to accelerating the phase-out all fossil energy sources, specifying that no new coal-fired power plants may be built.

Environmentalists also broadly welcomed the agreements. “The clear commitment to accelerate the expansion of renewables can be seen as a success and gives hope that the signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement will agree on a global renewables target at the climate conference in Dubai [COP28] at the end of the year,” Germanwatch executive director Christoph Bals told energy and climate newsletter Tagesspiegel Background.

He added the targets implied a five-fold increase in offshore wind, and a tripling of solar power by 2030.

But Bals also warned that the G7 commitment to phase out “unabated coal” leaves the door open for plants using carbon capture and storage (CCS). “CCS must not serve as a life extension for coal power.” He also criticised equating “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas using CCS and “green” hydrogen made with renewables: “Without strict criteria, this opens the door for a huge greenwashing show.”

Clean Energy Wire

What started as a rally of Canadian truckers angry at cross-border vaccine mandates has fast devolved into the occupation of a city, a protest against all life-saving Covid regulations, an anti-worker attack through the blockades, and a magnet for far-right grievances in Canada, the United States and the world.

As police passively watched, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” occupied Ottawa on January 28 with up to three hundred 30,000-pound tractor-trailer trucks parked tightly downtown, in front of Parliament buildings, Supreme Court and political offices including the prime minister‘s. MP Justin Trudeau was taken to an undisclosed location. “In some cases, truckers removed their tires and bled their brake lines to make their trucks immovable,” said police.

The truck-drivers were joined by up to five thousand on-foot demonstrators who have caused gridlock, harassed residents, set off fireworks, honked air horns all night, urinated on a national war memorial, and blasted awful rock music like Twisted Sister’s “We‘re Not Gonna Take It” — proving that anti-Vaxxer Canadians can be just as rude, obnoxious, and loud as their American counter-parts. Demonstrators marched through the street shouting “freedom” — a catchphrase for doing whatever they wanted without concern for personal consequences including infecting others.

Now into its third week of law-defying mirth and MAGA mayhem, the Trumpified demonstrators wave banners and wear hats with “Make Canada great again,” “Trump 2024,” “Vaccines don’t save lives, Jesus saves lives,” and most popular “Fuck Trudeau” — also seen on a giant truck stationed in front of the gates to Parliament.

Nazi and Confederate flags were seen flying, QAnon logos were emblazoned on trucks and signs, and banners were pasted to telephone poles bearing Trudeau’s face, reading: “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Many wonder why police abandoned Canada’s seat of power to this annoying, vulgar mob of truckers and anti-government agitators. Referencing the insurrectionary assault on the U.S. Capitol, an Ottawa city councilor called it, “January 6 in slow motion.”

A few thousand of Ottawa’s impatient majority took to the streets Saturday and Sunday to urge police to terminate the occupation of the city’s downtown, which mayor Jim Watson called “the most serious emergency” our city has ever faced.

“This convoy does not represent workers or working-class values,” said a demonstrator. “Truckers are right now delivering goods all over the country: They’re not in downtown Ottawa terrorizing our community. It’s time to take back our city: This is not what our country is all about, this kind of hatred and division.”

The trucker protest does not represent the Canadian attitude to vaccines — 90 percent of truckers and more than 80 percent of Canadians are vaccinated. Canadians did not elect the nativist, right-wing People’s Party who promised to end mandate “tyranny” last year.

Instead, they re-elected Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, who promoted a Covid mitigation strategy. A recent poll found that 65 percent of Canadians believe the “Freedom Convoy” represents only a “small minority of selfish Canadians.” Canada’s largest Truckers union — the Canadian Trucking Alliance — condemns the trucker protests. The Teamsters Union denounced the bridge blockade: “The so-called ‘freedom convoy’ and the despicable display of hate led by the political Right and shamelessly encouraged by elected conservative politicians does not reflect the values of Teamsters.”

Demanding that Parliament be dissolved and Trudeau removed from office, the truckers are an anti-worker, anti-government, anti-democratic fringe minority trying to dominate the majority of Canadians. Expressing what she perceived as their true nature, one counter-protester called the occupying group, “Alt-right fascists at the core, with dangerous intentions.”

An admitted conspiracy theorist, “Freedom Convoy” organizer James Bauder has endorsed the QAnon movement and called Covid-19 “the biggest political scam in history.” He is devoted to the far right: two years ago Bauder participated in another convoy called “United We Roll” which had connections to white nationalist hate groups.

This group also planned an anti-union protest where convoy members threatened to dismantle the picket line and run over workers. But “United We Roll” drew little attention outside Canada.

Quickly escalating into a global movement, the “Freedom Convoy” became an instant right wing cause célèbre. Donations poured in, prompting GoFundMe to pull the plug on the campaign after a few days under a policy that “prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment,” a void that was quickly filled by right-wing crowdfunding platforms.

Copycat convoys, using the truckism tactic, are rolling in Brussels, France, Australia and New Zealand.

A chorus of cheers arose from south of the Canadian border led by the Mar-a-Lago Crime Lord Seditionist. Popping up like programmed puppets,American republican politicians encouraged truck protests in the US. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said, “I hope the truckers clog up the cities” while comparing the protests to the civil rights movement. Eagerly scurrying in front of cameras, Senator Ted Cruz’s gag-inducing comments called the Canadian truckers “heroes” and “patriots marching for your freedom and my freedom.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who denounced Nancy Pelosi’s “Gazpacho police” (apparently she is a fierce opponent of Soup Nazis), suggested that the “corporate Communists” at GoFundMe should be arrested. Hilariously, truckers even embraced the support of Elon Musk — the Tesla CEO and creator of self-driving trucks that will put them out of work: he tweeted, “Canadian truckers rule.”

Leading the celebration of disruption, right wing media fuels the turmoil, throwing the grievance machine into full throttle. Decrying the “totalitarian mandates,” the pampered and vaccinated Fox anchors, who scream bloody murder when a Black Lives Matter protest shuts down a highway, refer to the Pro-Covid trucker blockade as “cool,” “impressive,” and “inspirational.” Sean Hannity nightly cheer-leads the free-dumb protests and fans the flames of their “righteous” protest. To Tucker Carlson, Canada is resisting the dark surveillance state led by “no more fearful despot in the world than Justin Trudeau.” Foaming at the mouth in anticipation, Carlson encouraged the proposed American convoy from California to Washington DC to disrupt Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address.

Fox News, who opposed advances by organized labor, demeaned unions, insulted striking workers, supported companies over unions, opposed higher wages for workers, and falsely blamed unions for supply chain troubles during the pandemic, eggs on this labor shutdown which sabotages other workers. Carlson claimed Thursday night that the blockade was “the single most successful human rights protest in a generation,” while boasting of the economic damage that the blockade has caused to other workers, forcing a shutdown of Ford and Toyota plants, and noting that “General Motors has canceled multiple shifts.”

Of course, the noxious reactionary truckers could not care less about the hardships and burdens of fellow workers. Many of the concerns of these odious demonstrators have little to do with workers’ rights or labor issues within Canada’s trucking industry. They can only bleat “no vaccines” when it comes to issues of utmost importance for the demographic they purport to represent, such as investment in public health care, employer accountability or financial support for workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic.

The convoy certainly is not advocating for workers to organize collectively into unions. Even though the Convoy purports to be a people’s movement, the anti-vaccine truckers promote a selfish, libertarian mindset where “individual freedom” includes the freedom to ignore how one’s decisions impact others. In reality, the truckers represent small, populist, far right interest groups, actively undermining real worker solidarity.

By the standards of mass protests around the world, the “Freedom Convoy” ranks as a nuisance. The number of protesters, about 8,000 at its peak, is modest. So far, violence is minimal. Most Canadians do not support the truckers or the cause. Yet, given their lack of support and relatively small size, they have been alarmingly successful at closing several international borders and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. (Though the Ambassador Bridge was partially opened Monday morning, three other border crossings remained blocked.)

With the scale of their trucks magnifying their civil disobedience, fringe protestors cause a huge commotion and generate lots of attention, which is further amplified by right wing media. Insurrection by air horn, the trucker protest demonstrates an striking new tactic of minority power that can significantly damage people’s lives, put a city under siege, hold government hostage, do economic devastation, inspire copycat actions, and reflects the international spread of the MAGA virus.

In France, a convoy of dozens of trucks and other vehicles, inspired by the Ottawa protests, headed from southern France to Paris on Wednesday, prompting the police to announce a ban on such protests as a risk to public order. “Freedom Convoy” protesters were set to arrive Monday in Brussels even after authorities there prohibited them from entering the city.

A U.S. group calling itself “Convoy to D.C. 2022” has announced an American version of the protest for next month. The GOP and Fox News take delight in this anti-science, anti-government movement that causes chaos and carnage. Quickly dumping their phony “America First” position, they revel in a protest that puts American workers out of work, hurts American businesses, opposes democracy, and supports authoritarianism.

The raucous images from Canada — a country widely regarded as a model of calm, tolerance and reason — manifest the worrisome degree to which Covid mandates have become a potent far right lightening rod for a delusional sense of persecution and what they see as government assaults on their “freedoms.” By disrupting everyday life, creating economic hardship, and successfully resisting duly elected authority, these anti-government agitators want to show that democracy cannot handle the crisis that they have generated. They hope this creates an appetite for another kind of rule — “I alone can fix it“ or authoritarian rule. While disgusting and un-American, the GOP — the party of sedition — and its propaganda network not only undermines democracy in the United States, but supports its destruction in Canada and around the world.

However, being privileged to live in a city with good public transport (Montreal) and typically using a car only for long journeys, I had to wait for the appearance of an EV with adequate range to meet my needs. The new Hyundai Kona seemed to fit the bill, and a week ago I finally took the plunge and got a Hyundai Kona.

As the previous owner of a Toyota Prius and a Honda Civic hybrid, I can say without hesitation that the Hyundai Kona is the most comfortable car I have ever owned, both in terms of its interior and its drivability.

It accelerates like a rocket, and the safety features are truly impressive. It steers you back into your lane if you wander, and slows down automatically if you approach the rear of another vehicle. It even suggests you take a coffee break if you have been on the road for a long time!

The EV model costs more than its gas-powered equivalent, but the data show that the cost is very much front-loaded, the high initial investment being offset over time by power and maintenance costs that are quite nominal. Even so, for me the decisive consideration was that since EVs are still priced beyond the means of many car-buyers, the fact that only increased demand will bring down the price means that those of us who can afford to buy an EV have a strong moral duty to do so.

Given that I now had the option to go electric, there was simply no way I was going to commit to continue paying into the criminal petroleum economy for the next ten years by buying a new gas-powered vehicle. Over 90% of Quebec’s power is produced by hydro-electricity, and it is a leader in wind energy, so that driving an electric car here really is a low-carbon enterprise.

Where I live, at least, range anxiety is wholly unjustified since there are currently over 2,000 charging stations all across Quebec, even in remote locations such as rural villages and national parks, and more are being installed every day. Still, I stop to recharge when the battery is still half full, since during the first week driving my new EV, mainly on highways, I noticed that my actual mileage is less than what was advertised. Still, on balance, and despite my initial sticker shock, I am now very comfortable with my decision.

I am proud to see that my province is leading North America in implementing the transition away from oil, with a firm commitment to EVs that includes not only a rapidly growing network of charging stations but also offers the most generous financial incentives anywhere on the continent: an $8,000 rebate on the purchase of any new EV, which is on top of the $5,000 offered by the Canadian federal government.

The car handles extremely well and feels quite solid on the road, unlike my Prius which always seemed ready to tip over on sharp curves. I have never been a fan of driving, but being behind the wheel of my new Kona is the closest it has ever felt to pleasurable. But when all is said and done, the true pleasure is the relief of knowing that I have, at long last and for the first time in my forty-three years of driving, forever broken the shackles that bound me to a destructive, exploitative system, stretching from dictatorial oil states to earth-wrecking Big Oil corporations, that I have always abhorred.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

2020 KONA electric | Explore the product | Hyundai Canada