Last Friday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Canadian parliament. For the occasion, the speaker of the house invited a ninety-eight-year-old Ukrainian World War II veteran to attend, and introduced him as a “hero”—prompting a standing ovation. It was soon discovered that this guest of honor had served in a Ukrainian-manned SS division that fought the Soviets under Nazi command. Terry Glavin observes that the incident has only given “new life” to official Russian propaganda about Kyiv’s supposed domination by Nazis, which has also been directed against Ottawa. Nor is it unique:

[This] happened on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, of all days. And in the presence of the gallant Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, himself a Jew, during what should have been a triumphant visit to the House of Commons. We are all suitably chastened, of course. The consensus is that parliament should now turn to sensibly banal questions like this one: how can we ensure that something like this never happens again?

There were also apologies all round last year because of the horrible optics of the Liberal MP Salma Zahid and the cabinet minister Omar Alghabra along with MPs from all the parties gathering for a Palestine Day event on Parliament Hill with characters known for regurgitating praise of terrorists and publishing outright Holocaust denial. Sorry, won’t happen again. Unacceptable.

Last year there was also the case of Laith Marouf, a grossly anti-Semitic apologist for the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad whose proposal to hector federally regulated broadcasters about how not to be racist was championed by cabinet heavyweight Ahmed Hussen and funded lavishly. Marouf’s various projects were eventually found to have hoovered up hundreds of thousands of dollars in [government] consultation funds.

The remedy? A promise that nothing like it would happen again. There would be workshops for senior federal officials in how to spot Jew hatred when it’s shouted in their faces.

Information about a supposedly near-finalized hostage deal continued to trickle out yesterday. While it’s entirely possible that by the time you read this a deal will be much more certain, it is every bit as likely that it will have fallen through by then. More likely still, we will learn that there are indefinite and unspecified delays. Then there are the details: even in the best of scenarios, not all the hostages will be returned at once, and Israel will have to make painful concessions in exchange, including the release of hundreds of hardened terrorists and the withdrawal from key parts of the Gaza Strip.

Unusually—if entirely appropriately—the president-elect’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has participated in the talks alongside members of President Biden’s team. Philip Klein examines the incoming Trump administration’s role in the process:

President-elect Trump has repeatedly warned that there would be “all hell to pay” if hostages were not returned from Gaza by the time he takes office. While he has never laid out exactly what the specific consequences for Hamas would be, there are some ominous signs that Israel is being pressured into paying a tremendous price.

There is obviously more here than we know. It’s possible that with the pressure from the Trump team came reassurances that Israel would have more latitude to reenter Gaza as necessary to go after Hamas than it would have enjoyed under Biden. . . . That said, all appearances are that Israel has been forced into making more concessions because Trump was concerned that he’d be embarrassed if January 20 came around with no hostages released.

While Donald Trump’s threats are a welcome rhetorical shift, part of the problem may be their vagueness. After all, it’s unlikely the U.S. would use military force to unleash hell in Gaza, or could accomplish much in doing so that the IDF can’t. More useful would be direct threats against countries like Qatar and Turkey that host Hamas, and threats to the persons and bank accounts of the Hamas officials living in those counties. Witkoff instead praised the Qatari prime minister for “doing God’s work” in the negotiations.”