My old comrade Ezra Levant has a great nose for these kinds of stories, but even by his standards this one's a doozy. Meet Air Canada pilot Mostafa Ezzo:
Mostafa Ezzo is a pilot with Air Canada, flying their 787s.
That's the plane Air Canada flies to Tel Aviv.
They should probably keep him off of that route.
Just to be safe. pic.twitter.com/D7dWXTweBL
— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) October 10, 2023
Air Canada has decided to go a little further than that:
We are aware of the unacceptable posts made by an Air Canada pilot. We are taking this matter very seriously, and he was taken out of service on Mon, Oct. 9. We firmly denounce violence in all forms.
— Air Canada (@AirCanada) October 10, 2023
The suddenly sheepish Mr Ezzo has taken his social media offline, including the Instagram post where he says "F**k you, Israel. Burn in hell."
In its way, this is the perfect summation of the post-9/11 world:
You have to get to the airport hours in advance, shuffle through "security", semi-disrobe, have your medicines and toiletries examined, unpack all your electronic devices ...so you can be delivered onto a 'plane flown by a Hamas supporter.
The whole rigmarole of post-9/11 security theatre is endured by the citizenry because they assume that, if they're doing this to gran'ma, imagine what the background checks for the toilet cleaners and gate operators must be like.
Oh, and Mr Ezzo is also a flight instructor - which is where we came in, just twenty-two years ago, with a bunch of young Saudis telling their own instructor in Florida to skip the bit about how to land the jet as they didn't need to know that...
The entire miserable failed "war on terror" has been a war on you while terrorist supporters have the run of the planet.
On the other hand, Jonni Martinez is keeping a sense of proportion:
They should change his route but not fire him for his political opinion ... that would violate his political freedom even if it's wrong
— Jonni Martinez (@iJonniM) October 10, 2023
Yeah, take him off the Tel Aviv route and transfer him to JFK. I mean, it's not like he said he wouldn't shag Ava Evans.
~Yesterday I included the joyous scenes from outside the Sydney Opera House, where thousands of "Australians" were chanting "F**k the Jews!" and "Gas the Jews!" It's good to know that no matter how stringent the formerly Lucky Country's "hate speech" laws get that you can still yell "Gas the Jews!" with impunity, isn't it?
But, alas, there's always someone who wants to harsh your mellow. So here's HM Constabulary arresting a man for having an Israeli flag:
NSW Police arrest a Sydney man for waving an Israel flag near a pro-Palestine rally and charge him with breach of the peace. Extraordinarily unfair censorship considering hundreds of Israeli civilians were just murdered in a brutal terror attack. He can't protest? pic.twitter.com/oRQgNRpG2X
— Drew Pavlou 柏乐志 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) October 9, 2023
As you can hear, he's being arrested for "breaching the peace" - that would be the peace of the thousands of would-be Jew-gassers.
As much as Air Canada's Hamas pilot, that too has a certain symbolism. I doubt Sir Robert Menzies' generation would recognise the New Australia - and I doubt such as remains of the Old Australia will enjoy living with it.
We're really getting way beyond the dreary 1930s comparisons here. The reason the Germans had to hold their Wannsee conference in secret is because, if they had announced in public they were going to kill all the Jews, even your average quiet-life keep-your-head-down Kraut might have felt a bit queasy about it: "Are we the baddies?" and all that.
But eight decades later in New South Wales the new Australians are doing ad-hoc Wannsee conferences in front of the Sydney Opera House. And Oz Wanker Copper of the Day, NSW assistant commissioner Tony Cooke, says the one bloke with an Israeli flag has to be arrested "for his own safety".
It's not really about Jews, is it? This is your future, Australia.
~As I write, the top three stories on the BBC live-blog:
Inside Gaza City: A neighbourhood destroyed and queues for bread
Gaza's sole power plant to stop working in three hours
Life in Gaza: A journalist's video diary
Israeli babies specifically targeted and murdered? Hey, you gotta be able to prioritise.
~One of the SteynOnline team in Tel Aviv begged to differ with yesterday's column noting The Spectator's take on the under-performance of the IDF. This is a view from the ground, and I thought worth breaking out in full:
There's a lot of incompetence, scandal and future head-rolling about, but it's not accurate to say the military was nowhere. Yes, the area was undermanned and the Defense Ministry bean-counters doomed a lot of people to death by cutting the security budgets and weapons allocations of those small communities.
But the first thing the attackers did when they breached the border, within seconds, was to attack the army outpost at the border and kill or capture all the soldiers. They destroyed a manned tank with a primitive drone strike. That was the main line of defense.
The closest community to the fence is only 500 yards away. In the towns and cities, they attacked the police stations first and killed as many police as they could. And the army is not responsible for security internally; the police is.
The police and soldiers were battling at least 1,500 terrorists with automatic weapons and rocket launchers (i.e. they have counted 1500 dead bodies of attackers in Israel, and then there were the ones that went back to Gaza).
About 200 police and soldiers were killed in these battles, so they were 1) Fighting for their lives and 2) Beyond surviving and killing their attackers, they then had to save people and kill terrorists in the towns they were in before moving on to those small communities that don't have police stations and are protected by their small security squads (the ones starved of weapons and armored vehicles by the Defense Ministry).
So while terrible long-term operational plans and decisions were made by higher-ups, the police and soldiers were on the scene, fighting and dying, and managed to kill 1,500 attackers and likely wound more.
E.g. from the Times of Israel:
According to some accounts, the Israeli Air Force helicoptered into Be'eri two platoons of its special forces Shaldag unit, but apparently they were overwhelmed by the terrorists. In videos of Be'eri circulating in pro-Palestinian social media channels, bodies of men in battle vests are seen lying around the iconic yellow gate of the kibbutz.
"Kibbutz Be'eri will be no more," Dani Fux, another resident in his seventies, told Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Nahum Barnea.
Fux said about 90 terrorists entered Be'eri at about 7 a.m. on Saturday. Two hours later, the Shaldag detachment of about 20 troops landed, but "within a short time, the force was eroded," using a military euphemism. "From then on, we only heard Arabic. The terrorists went from door to door, abducted people or killed them. Sometimes they only killed. Sometimes they took the kids and killed the parents, sometimes the other way around.
~We opened The Mark Steyn Club some six-and-a-half years ago, and I'm thrilled by all those SteynOnline aficionados across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. With Fifteen Minute Cities closing in all around, those in search of strictly in-home diversions can find more information about our Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
