Where Does Government End and Private Power Begin?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

We live in an era in which globalisation and the geopolitical environment have arguably made a certain level of coordination between private corporations and nation-states, known as public-private partnerships, conducive for achieving the interests of both parties.

The public-private partnership approach, however, also comes with some significant dangers and risks. Because despite the word public, far too often in practice the actual public seems to be left out of the approach.

In fact, often the advantage of the approach seems to be that public-private partnerships allows for a convenient end-run around the obstacle of the broader democratic process and any potential concerns the voting public may hold.

An example of public-private partnership is the way an unaccountable network of technology and media companies, along with ideological NGOs, now systematically remove and censor politically inconvenient information from the internet, manipulate search results, algorithmic feeds, and AI models, and boost chosen propaganda narratives.

Notably, the goal seems to be to manipulate and silence growing public criticism of elites’ anti-democratic use of public-private collusion on controversial issues like migration and climate change.

To make sense of this, it is necessary to understand a key term: “whole of society.” The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration in the United States. Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions.

For companies, it can involve complying with environmental and human rights standards when carrying out their business activities. For civil society organisations, it can include ensuring they adhere to standards of public integrity. For individuals, it can mean respecting the rules governing interactions with public officials.

In other words, the government together with corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens enact policies, creating a force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you make up your communal safety net, and even your neighbours.

A whole-of-society approach embraces both formal and informal institutions in seeking a generalized agreement across society about policy goals and the means to achieve them.

But there are, of course, dangers. 

“Facebook now is more like a government than a traditional company," Mark Zuckerberg himself has stated, in the way it sets social and political policies for its nearly three billion users, he acknowledged. What has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life.

Social media has increased public access to information and created platforms for political activism. Yet some also say it is harmful to democracy. They believe digital media are a threat to democracy rather than an opportunity for increased political participation.

The problem is that online it is the big tech platforms themselves who have become the governments, the police and the courts, perhaps unwillingly. They make their own rules about what people are allowed to say. And it’s quite tricky and expensive for individuals to turn to the courts when it looks like a tech company has violated their free speech.

So when a private company gets to decide what is acceptable and what is not acceptable online, that can cause tensions for a democratic society. People were left wondering why Facebook, or X (formerly Twitter), prior to its purchase by Elon Musk, accepted some things from liberals, while it censored conservatives. Zuckerberg himself admitted this in August, writing a letter to Congress in which he stated the Biden administration had pressured him to limit free speech.

Internet platforms have become the equivalent of town squares, hosting much of our public debate. These platforms have an impact on our society and our democracies. And this means that they have to be governed by laws made by our representatives and run in a way that doesn’t damage democracy. Policymakers are faced with the challenge of strengthening accountability and oversight of social media to address such threats, without curtailing access to their many benefits.

Meanwhile, the growth of so-called “populist” movements across the Western world can be seen, in large measure, as a democratic backlash against the increasingly widespread use of public-private collusion to “solve” nearly every controversial issue that arises today. They can sidestep democratic debate and accountability on these issues in order to force through ill-considered policy changes which all-too often actively harm the interests of national populations. Such behaviour is utterly corrosive to public trust and the democratic legitimacy of institutions of all kinds.

It’s important to view the “whole of society” as a totalizing form of politics. It demands political participation from corporations, civic groups, and other nonstate actors. What the various iterations of this approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and their embrace of social media surveillance. They therefore extend the state’s authority over formerly independent centres of power.

Will the incoming Trump administration in Washington take on the task of reversing this?

 

Lebanon’s Army Was a Bystander in the Hezbollah-Israeli War

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

When Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon in October, with Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants engaged in full-scale war, the Lebanese army largely stood on the sidelines. It’s not the first time the national army has found itself watching war at home from the discomfiting position of bystander.

This recent Israeli incursion into Lebanon, currently in a ceasefire, was its fourth in the neighbouring country in the past 50 years. In most of the previous invasions, the Lebanese army played a similarly peripheral role.

The army is militarily overshadowed by Hezbollah. It has about 80,000 troops, with around 5,000 of them deployed in the country’s south. Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, and its arsenal, built with support from Iran, is also far more advanced.

With an aging arsenal and no air defences, and battered by five years of economic crisis, the national army is ill-prepared to defend Lebanon against either aerial bombardment or a ground offensive by a well-equipped modern army like Israel’s, whose current ground offensive aims to push Hezbollah back from the border and allow tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel to return after a year.

By July 2006, when Hezbollah and Israel began fighting a monthlong war, the Lebanese army “had not been able to invest in any real-world postwar modernization, had no ability to deter Israeli air power” and “was left completely exposed,” explained Aram Nerguizian, a senior associate with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

When Lebanon’s financial system and currency collapsed in 2019, the army took a further hit. It had no budget to buy weapons and maintain its existing supplies, vehicles and aircraft. At one point, the United States and Qatar both provided a monthly subsidy for soldiers’ salaries.

In Lebanon, many believe that the United States has blocked the army from obtaining more advanced weaponry that might allow it to defend against Israel. “It is my personal opinion that the United States does not allow the military to have advanced air defence equipment, and this matter is related to Israel,” contended Walid Aoun, a retired Lebanese army general and military analyst.

Hezbollah’s de facto takeover of the country began in 2006, following its war with Israel. That December, Hezbollah and its allies started large street demonstrations to pressure parliament to give them veto power over government decisions. They boycotted parliament and delayed the selection of a new Lebanese president. Then in 2008, Hezbollah used its guns against fellow Lebanese to get what it wanted: veto power over any actions by the Lebanese state.

The 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict ended with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which was meant to create a demilitarized zone south of the Litani River in Lebanon, about 30 kilometres from the Israel-Lebanon demarcation line.

Lebanese soldiers were deployed in the country’s south in non-combat roles along with more than 10,000 peacekeepers with the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

UNIFIL, in its current iteration, was given a mandate in 2006 via Resolution 1701 to help ensure that the area south of the Litani River would remain free of any armed presence save its own and that of the Lebanese Armed Forces. The current ceasefire will again see Hezbollah forces move north of the river, replaced by UNIFIL and the Lebanese army.

Of course Resolution 1701 was ostensibly meant to end the earlier 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war on terms that would prevent Hezbollah from launching more attacks against Israel by giving the Israelis a demilitarized zone on their northern border enforced by international troops.

The catch was that UNIFIL would implement its mandate with the support of and in coordination with the Lebanese government -- which is effectively controlled by Hezbollah. So rather than decrease Hezbollah’s strength on Israel’s border, the group’s armed presence south of the Litani grew exponentially under UNIFIL’s oversight.

Will it work this time? UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti has explained that it is clear that the Lebanese army was not currently strong enough to implement Resolution 1701 and that it would need international support. Building the army up, he maintained, “will take a while, but the commitment is there. We need to bring state authority to the south. Not only of the army, but the full state authority to the south of Lebanon.”

But that would require a robust state, or at the very least a belief in one. And many Lebanese have lost faith in a country that was plagued by corruption, nepotism and political paralysis long before the current crisis.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Oct. 18 made a rare rebuke to Iran over reported comments that it would be ready to help “negotiate” a new UN resolution on Lebanon. Najib Mikati declared in a statement that the comments amounted to “a blatant interference in Lebanese affairs.”

Can Lebanon escape Hezbollah’s grasp? Only if Lebanese leaders, working together with European and U.S. support, act. So far, most seem unwilling or unable to do so.

Hezbollah’s support base is the Shiite community, which is about a third of Lebanon’s population. Yet anti-Hezbollah political forces are missing in action. Neither Sunni nor Christian nor Druze leaders have stepped forward to demand that Hezbollah relinquish its control of the state. Otherwise, little will change.

 

The World in 2025 May Become an Even Darker Place

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

On November 12, the former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, did a brave thing. Speaking to the annual conference of the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, in Washington, DC, she didn’t provide uplifting words or an assurance that things will somehow get better.

She is the founder of the Free Press newspaper – “for free people,” as its masthead states – and has been courageously fighting against the antisemitic tide that has enveloped the Western world since October 7, 2023. I can do no better than to quote her opening statement:

“When did you know? 

“Looking back, now that we are on the far side, I wonder: When did you realize that things had changed? 

“When did you know that the things we had taken for granted were suddenly out of our reach? That the norms that felt as certain as gravity had disappeared? That the institutions that had launched our grandparents had turned hostile to our children? 

“When did you notice that what had once been steady was now shaky ground? Did you look down to see if your own knees were trembling?

“When did you realize that we were not immune from history, but living inside of it? 

“When did you see that our world was actually the world of yesterday -- and a new one, one with far fewer certainties, one where everything seems up for grabs, was coming into being?”

How well we now realize that it applies even more so, in Canada, where a veritable chasm has opened up, as in a horror movie, and it is filled with antisemites as vicious as rarely before seen in this country.

Since October 7, 2023, all levels of government in Canada have failed, either by design or due to incompetence, to understand and act on the gravity of the moment.

Those on the front lines already feel it. Jewish students at the University of British Columbia this past summer hung posters throughout campus that read: “I am a Jew. I hide my identity because I feel threatened and unsafe,” and “Stop terrorizing Jews.” No police chief instructed them to hide; Jewish students could detect the tenor and a mounting risk of violence on campus.

And it keeps getting worse. Dawson College in Montreal shut down classes for almost 10,000 students on November 21 after students voted 447-247 in favour of a strike to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza. The closure of the public college was prompted by numerous emails and calls from members of the community expressing concerns about the safety of students and employees on the day of the boycott.

Demonstrators gathered outside Dawson’s campus and left after an hour, marching east to Concordia University, where they met up with more strikers. Concordia had a phalanx of security guards manning the doors, police officers inside the lobby and large panels of plywood on the inside of their windows. Dozens of other student associations voted to strike. At McGill, activists planted a tree in solidarity with Palestinians.

There were several protests a day later, including one at Université du Québec à Montréal. An effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set on fire and smoke bombs were lit as demonstrators chanted “Free Palestine” and “Israel is terrorist, Canada is complicit.” Rioters that evening clashed with police officers, smashed windows of businesses, and even set vehicles ablaze in the downtown area. 

How has all this come about? We must face facts: Canada in recent decades adopted a policy of unfettered and incautious immigration, and with it have come some immigrants who are steeped in antisemitic values. We now realize that, in our big cities, they have changed the very nature of Canadian society. They have not adapted to liberal western values. Rather the reverse: they are bending this country towards theirs – to the detriment of Canada’s Jewish population. The examples are many, and they would have been beyond belief a mere decade ago.

A vigil that was scheduled to be held in Mississauga, Ont., November 26 in memory of “the great Martyr” Yahya Sinwar --the Hamas leader responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel -- did not, after numerous complains, occur on the originally scheduled date. A flyer for the event, which was shared on social media, used the slogan, “Lest we forget our heroes,” and red poppies on top of a black and white photo of the architect of October 7.

However, the city’s mayor, a onetime Liberal MP, had no problems with it, even comparing Sinwar to Nelson Mandela. “I just want to point out, and I’m not being facetious, Nelson Mandela was declared a terrorist by the United States of America until the year 2008,” Carolyn Parrish stated. “Your terrorist and somebody else’s terrorist may be two different things.” Not surprisingly, anti-Israel rallies are almost a weekly occurrence in her city.

An Ottawa school played an Arabic-language Palestinian protest song associated with fighting in Gaza as the soundtrack to its Remembrance Day presentation, causing outrage and distress for some students and parents. Principal Aaron Hobbs of Sir Robert Borden School defended the selection, saying it was chosen to bring diversity and inclusion to Remembrance Day.

Speaking of Remembrance Day, the New Democratic Party, which was once led by David Lewis, a Jew, and supported by many in the Jewish community, is now completely supportive of the Palestinian cause. Edmonton NDP MP Heather McPherson, one of the most vocally anti-Israel members of the House of Commons, had just delivered a statement accusing Israel of genocide, compared her wearing of a watermelon pin to the wearing of a Remembrance Day poppy. The watermelon slice has been adopted by the anti-Israel movement as representative of the Palestinian flag because it has the same colour scheme, of black, red and green. “I stand here proudly wearing a pin that shows that I stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” she stated.

The University of Victoria in British Columbia cancelled a scheduled November 24 on-campus talk by an extremist preacher who is on record calling for the annihilation of Jews. Invited by the Muslim Students Association, one of the central organizers of anti-Israel rallies outside the B.C. Parliament Buildings, the event was widely criticized on local forums, forcing the university to decline the booking request for the event.

Sheikh Younus Kathrada himself blamed the cancellation “on a Zionist run organization which is clearly pro-ethnic cleansing, pro-genocide, pro-apartheid and pro-murder.”

Meanwhile, Canada finally listed the pro-Palestinian group Samidoun, based in Vancouver, as a terrorist entity October 15, after endless hesitation. Known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, it has close links with and advances the interests of another group that Canada already lists as a terrorist entity, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Vancouver police launched a criminal investigation into a rally Samidoun organized on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, which included a masked speaker who told the crowd that “we are Hezbollah and we are Hamas.” She also led cries of “death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel.” More recently, the home of Charlotte Kates, a director of Samidoun, was searched by the police.

Behind much of this we find a web of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations operating in Canada, according to a recent study by NGO Monitor, and nearly all of them overlap in activity and funding.

 “The NGO Network Driving Antisemitism in Canada” was released on November 4. It highlights the structure and dynamics of the NGO network. The “dangerous spike” in Jew-hatred is concurrent with “an increase in activity by an interconnected and coordinated network of NGOs, whose campaigns of anti-Israel demonization, antisemitism and intimidation create a hostile environment throughout Canada,” the report declared. “A number of the leading groups are linked to Palestinian terror organizations and hide their sources of funding.”

Despite their small numbers, campus-operating organizations play a prominent role in the network, collaborating with many nonprofits, including those receiving funding from the Canadian government. These groups were “leading the campaigns, the attacks, the antisemitism on university campuses within Canada, and are closely interrelated,” according to Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.

To top all this off, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended his assertion that he would support the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and ex-Israeli defence minister Yaov Gallant on an International Criminal Court warrant issued on November 23 should they come to Canada. The court stated that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the two intentionally targeted civilians in Gaza during Israel’s ongoing retaliatory war against Hamas. This is the first time that a democratic country, with a robust and independent judiciary, has had arrest warrants issued for its leadership. It is international lawfare in its most extreme form, and a reward for terrorism.

I could go on ad infinitum with other examples and take up this entire issue of Shalom. But the bottom line is this: Everything I just described would have seemed unimaginable. Had you predicted it, you would have been laughed at or seen as a doomsayer.

But, as Bari Weiss knows, and so should the rest of us, we are in the midst of a  worldwide eruption of antisemitism not seen since the Holocaust. And there’s no sign it’s going to get better.