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" Back in August 2013, when Obama entertained the White House press corps in the Rose Garden to explain that he wasn't quite as eager to upbraid Bashar Assad as he might have inadvertently led them earlier to believe, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees counted about two million Syrians in its refugee statistics. "

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" About 3,500 years ago, when a patriarch called Moses was supposed to be leading a tribe of Seth's descendants out of the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, another tribe of shepherds and pastoralists had already established a small kingdom for itself at Balkh. "

Terry Glavin

Kingdom

Out

About

" It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the 'international community' had learned nothing since the Holocaust. "

" It's known as the Livingstone Formulation. It's a cunning rhetorical device routinely deployed to shield avowedly left-wing establishment figures from any scrutiny that might expose their 'anti-Zionist' obsessions as redolent of a bigotry of that older and more unambiguously unsanitary type: antisemitism. "

Terry Glavin

Older

Shield

" What mattered about Alan Kurdi's photograph was that it made Canadians very angry, and the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats ended up competing with each other over which party was offering the most generous refugee policy. "

" Now that the Liberal party has returned to power after nearly a decade of Stephen Harper's Conservative government and its on-again, off-again friendliness with Beijing, the propaganda line is that Canada-China relations are on the verge of a 'new golden age.' Count on it. There will be a price, and we will pay. We always do. "

" When one's greatest 'world stage' ambition is a non-voting seat on the U.N. Security Council five years down the road, one would not want to say anything to hurt the feelings of the veto holders in Moscow or Beijing. We get it. But let's at least be honest about all this, please. Enough of the 'Canada is back' slogans already. "

" It is an intellectual and moral vacuity that has crippled what the World Social Forum's founders sincerely hoped would produce some sort of democratic alternative to what they saw as the heartless corporate model of globalization. "

" Under Xi, China has again become the world's top jailer of journalists. China's rank on the Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom is 176th out of 180 countries. China comes in dead last on the Freedom House 'Freedom on the Net' list. "

" It might help to know that in Afghanistan citizenship papers and birth certificates and the official registration of births and deaths are the exotica of faraway places. One is born 'in the time of the pomegranate harvest' or some such thing or one's birthdate is recorded as the first day of the year if you are even aware of the year you were born. "

" Patrick Pearse - who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin - is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish. "

" It wasn't until the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was ratified by the United Nations in 1948 that Lemkin's proposed law was given at least the appearance of force and effect. "

" It was in Dara'a that Syria's non-violent democratic movement had begun in 2011, with schoolboys scrawling on a wall: 'The people want to topple the regime.' "

" During the post-Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time between 1992 and 1996 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb of as many as 50,000 corpses. "

" If you rely on a more conventional understanding of the term 'left-wing' as being associated with gradations of socialism in the emancipation of the working class, the Leap Manifesto looks something more along the lines of what the great British socialist and essayist George Orwell was on about in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' in 1937. "

" The Canadian economy relies on foreign trade. Nearly three-quarters of Canada's exports go south. "

Terry Glavin

Trade

Economy

" Afghanistan's story, backwards or sideways, is not confined to the Americans or the English. "

" The United States is NATO's leading military power, and President Barack Obama has required NATO to align behind a doctrine that has amounted to the most disastrous American foreign-policy debacle since Vietnam. "

" A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria. "

" Balkh is now little more than a sleepy Afghan town of overgrown ruins forgotten by the world. On market day, down lanes that wind through apple orchards and cherry orchards, merchants slowly make their way to the central bazaar, their wares teetering on donkey carts. "

" It isn't true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners 'invaded' Afghanistan. "

" Cain slew Abel. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Qur'an agree, although in the Qur'an these first sons of Adam and Eve are Qabeel and Habeel. Cain, which is to say Qabeel, wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse. "

" On Sept. 20, 2011, a year after I spoke with Rabanni, a couple of Taliban emissaries arrived at his Kabul fortress with a gift for his 71st birthday. It turned out not to be the truce offering they had claimed they were bringing: one of the Talibs had a bomb hidden in his turban. "

" As with the Pacific Gateway, Canadians were similarly hoodwinked by the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP). "

" The anti-war politicians who have risen to power in Washington, London, Ottawa and Brussels have never had to explain why they were offering the persecuted people of Iraq nothing that was in any way more useful to them than the shoddy, outrageously ill-planned intervention that was on offer from Blair and Bush back in 2003. "

" As far back as 2008, the Canadian Forces brass was explicit: drones with 'all-weather precision strike capabilities' were a 'requirement' for Canada's overseas operations. "

" Canada's total exports into global markets reached a record high of $528.8 billion in 2014, the last year with fully available figures. A mere $18.8 billion of those exports went to China. "

" It's true that since 9/11, the application of conventional military rules of engagement has gotten a bit foggy. The Taliban were not an 'enemy state,' but the Canadian Forces conducted its operations in Afghanistan as though the rules of war applied anyway. "

" It was Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez who benefited most from the World Social Forum's enthusiasms. "

" The overwhelming majority of Afghans are not tribal, and they're not Pashtun. "

" As far back as Iran's aborted 'Green Revolution' in 2009, Obama's supplications to Iran's ruling theocracy have amounted to diplomatic shivs in the backs of Iran's youthful democratic insurrectionists, mash notes written directly to Khomeinist supremo Ali Khamenei and the scuttling of programs documenting the regime's human rights outrages. "