In Bed with the Elephant

Rex Brynen - A Time of Turbulence, Tumult and Transformation in the Middle East

Rex Brynen - a renowned scholar over three decades and one of the most astute and informed  observers of the Middle East.
The Summer of 2025 will be remembered as a time of transformation in the Middle East. 
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a surprise attack on military and nuclear facilities in Iran. Israel claimed the so-called pre-emptive strikes were meant to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. In the ensuing 12-day war. Israeli strikes  killed over 900 Iranians. Iran’s retaliatory attacks killed 28 Israelis.
On June 22, the US joined Israel’s campaign and bombed Iranian nuclear plants. The next day US President Trump announced that Israel and Iran had come to an agreement on a ceasefire which took effect on June 24th. 
In addition to the 12 Day War the chaotic  political situation in Syria, and the ongoing genocide in the Gaza  are altering  the political landscape in the region. 
 Since mid-July in the Southern Syrian city  of Suweyda  clashes between  Druze groups and  Bedouin tribes have displaced 175,000 people and caused over 1000 deaths. On July 16 Israel bombed the Syrian Defences ministry in central Damascus along with other military sites in the capital and targets in Southern Syria claiming to protect minority  Druze communities and sending a warning message to Syrian President Ahmed Al Sharaa. 
In the occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza every day seems to bring more stories of horror and devastation. Since October 7  2023 when an Hamas led attack   killed 1200 Israelis  including over 600 civilians and 39 children, Israel has killed 60,000 Palestinians   including over 18,000 children according to the UN, displaced millions and leveled much of Gaza. The UN reports that Israeli forces have killed 1000 desperate Palestinians seeking aid since May 2025. 
For the first time two Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel have officially declared that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. This follows an earlier determination in December 2024 by the respected international human rights organizations like Amnesty International  that Israel was committing genocide in real time. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (or IPC), a global hunger monitoring system, states in a new report that the “worst-case scenario of famine” is unfolding in Gaza. The IPC has confirmed that   at least 122 Palestinians including 83 children have died of starvation.  Even US president Donald Trump whose government, continues to provide Israel with  both moral  and material support in the form of billions of dollars worth of weapons, is acknowledging that starvation is occurring in Gaza.  

Fred Anderson - Author of Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal: A Memoir

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Fred Anderson was born in Mississippi in the late 1940s. He was among the youngest full-time SNCC workers in an organization defined by its youth. He was a courageous young rebel, a teenage wunderkind, who at 15 was working as an organizer alongside such civil rights luminaries as Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Hollis Watkins, Stokely Carmichael and his mentor and future Montreal roommate Bob Moses.
Anderson is a Forest Gumpian type figure, who was present for many of the seminal moments in the history of the civil rights movement. He participated in Freedom Summer, was in the room when it was announced that the three civil rights workers- Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman- were missing, and attended the historic 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
On Jan 6, 1966, SNCC became the first major civil rights organization to come out against the Vietnam War. The statement the group issued was bold and categorical. It did not equivocate.
“We believe the United States Government has been deceptive in its claim of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the Government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people. The United States Government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders…We ask where the draft for the freedom fight in the United States is?”
Towards the end of 1966 Fred Anderson left the United States to avoid being sent to fight in Vietnam. He moved  to Montreal with his friends Herman Carter and Bob Moses,  and for the next 10 years lived underground not revealing his true identity out of fear  that given his role in SNCC he’d be targeted by the FBI, apprehended and sent to prison in the US,  as he had heard had happened to other Black civil rights activists and war resisters who’d escaped to Canada.
Anderson became engaged in political organizing and community life in Montreal.
He attended the historic Congress of Black Writers Conference at McGill University in 1968- one of the major Black Power gatherings of the decade.
During the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, still the biggest student occupation in Canadian history in which Black, Brown and White students protested against racial discrimination in the classroom at the then Sir George Williams University now Concordia, Anderson played “a critical organizing role” behind the scenes trying to mobilize the community to support the students. He drafted petitions and wrote editorials in community newspapers. 
He had close relationships with the prominent Black student leaders Anne Cools, a future Canadian Senator, and Rosie Douglas, future Prime Minister of Dominica, both of whom were jailed for their involvement in the Sir George Williams events.
He was close friends with a Who’s Who of the English Canadian literary scene. Novelists Margaret Laurence  , Timothy Findlay, W.O. Mitchell and Mordecai Richler. He considered Austin Clarke, Giller Prize winning author of The Polished Hoe, his best friend.
But he also counted many members of Quebec’s literati and radical political community as close confidants. He knew the Quebec independendiste firebrand Pierre Bourgault and had close relationships with Quebec poets Roland Giguere and Victor Levy- Beaulieu. He was very close with physician and Governor General Award-winning novelist Jacques Ferron, Roch Carrier-beloved author of The Hockey Sweater, acclaimed writer Dany Laferrière, and the Quebec historian and author of A People’s History of Quebec, Jacques Lacoursière.
He was involved with the NBCC (the National Black Coalition of Canada)- arguably the most significant pan-Canadian Black organization in history - and later helped found the Concordia Summer Institute for community organizers. 
Fred Anderson has been a lifelong change agent. His journey has taken him from the Deep South of the United States to the Far North of Canada where he has worked in Cree and Inuit communities.  Fred Anderson is a formidable builder of relationships and institutions, and a bridge between solitudes. He’s just written a memoir that documents his extraordinary life. It’s called Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal.
 

Agnès Callamard - Amnesty International’s Secretary General discusses A World of Human Rights, Freedom & Justice for All

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has been a defender of human rights for most of her life. Her maternal grandfather fought for the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Callamard was born in 1963 into a lower middle-class family in a small village in Southeastern France about 60 kilometres north of Avignon. She attended Sciences Po Grenoble for her undergraduate degree.
Earned a master’s in international and African Studies at the renowned Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC where she was one of a handful of White Students – an experience she describes as transformative.
And she received her PhD at the New School in New York City.
Prior to becoming Amnesty’s Secretary General, Callamard was the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Adrian Harewood sat down with Agnès Callamard in May 2025 at the head office of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ottawa. We spoke about, growing courage, fighting impunity investigating the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the current state of human rights in the world and the ability of Amnesty International to affect change.

GUESTCAST: The Takeover - Smoke, Fire and the Climate Pushback

This week, we’re doing something a little different. We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Canada’s National Observer to share the first episode of their gripping new podcast, The Takeover.
This series pulls back the curtain on a rising movement of politicians, think tanks and billionaires working to dismantle global climate commitments…
All of this at a time when huge parts of Canada enter extreme heat warnings under record-setting temperatures and wildfires burn across the country. 
In this first episode, journalist Sandra Bartlett travels to London to attend one of the biggest conservative conferences in the world.
You can find The Takeover on your favourite podcast app or on Canada’s National Observer’s website.
We’ll be back next week on In Bed with the Elephant with more conversations that matter. But for now, here’s episode one of The Takeover.

Niigaan Sinclair - Imagining Indigenous Futures and Healthier Relations with the Canadian State

Niigaan Sinclair is one of the most creative, provocative and dynamic thinkers of his generation.  As a journalist, academic and son of the late lawyer, jurist, Senator and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair, he has spent his life and career thinking about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state.
In his 2024 Governor General Award-winning book of non-fiction, Winipek: Visions of Canada from An Indigenous Centre, Niigaan Sinclair outlines new transformative possibilities for healthier and more productive relations between Indigenous people and Canadians. He imagines a new politics, proposes a collective immersion in Indigenous histories and philosophies, and a return to Indigenous practices in order to inform our collective way forward.
Niigaan Sinclair is a professor at the University of Manitoba where he holds the Faculty of Arts professorship in Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics in the Department of Indigenous Studies. He is also an award-winning columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. 
 

Bob Plamondon - John Diefenbaker: The Political Outsider & Man of the People who became Prime Minister

Bob Plamondon is an acclaimed writer and Canadian historian who thinks for too long John Diefenbaker has been unfairly maligned by his critics and hasn’t been given his due. 
He’s the author of six books. including Blue Thunder: The Truth About Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper & The Shawinigan Fox: How Jean Chretien Defeated the Elites and Reshaped Canada.
His latest book is called Freedom Fighter: John Diefenbaker’s Battle for Canadian Liberties and Independence. 
Diefenbaker was a political maverick- a prairie populist who rose from humble beginnings to become Canada’s 13th Prime Minister.  
He was a complex and at times polarizing figure who throughout his 39 years as a Member of Parliament, remained a political outsider, even within the Conservative Party he led. 
Diefenbaker’s strong personality alienated some of his fellow MPs in the Tory caucus who regarded him as a lone wolf – brusque, domineering and untrusting.
But Dief the Chief’s charisma captivated ordinary Canadians who were inspired by his commitment to their health and welfare, his oratorical flair, and his common touch. They saw  John Diefenbaker as a “Man of the People.” 
John George Diefenbaker was born in 1895 in Neustadt, Ontario. In the southwestern region of the province. He was the grandson of German and Scottish immigrants.  
When he was 8 years old, he and his family moved West where he grew up poor in the fledgling province of Saskatchewan. 
John Diefenbaker served as a lieutenant in the First World War. 
After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1919, he became a small-town lawyer who reveled in fighting for the marginalized, downtrodden and dispossessed. He was a self-described “sworn enemy of discrimination and injustice.” 
As a young man, Diefenbaker brimmed with political ambition. It took him some years to find his footing, but once he finally won an election, he never lost his riding again.   
In the mid-1950s, Diefenbaker took over a fractious and moribund Conservative Party, refashioned it in his image, and transformed it into a political juggernaut, winning three consecutive federal elections, one of them in a historic landslide.
John Diefenbaker provoked strong emotions.
His critics accused him of being an erratic, reckless and ill-disciplined leader. They blamed him for what they regarded as a series of foreign policy blunders, including mishandling Canada’s critical relationship with the United States. They attacked him for canceling a Canadian aviation marvel - the Avro Arrow. 
His supporters though hailed him as a principled visionary, praising him for giving Indigenous peoples the vote, championing the Bill of Rights -a precursor to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, instituting a more inclusive immigration policy, and boldly opposing South Africa’s readmission to the Commonwealth due to its failure to renounce its White Supremacist system of Racial Apartheid. 
John Diefenbaker was a man of contradictions. 
He could be petty, vindictive, unforgiving and even cruel. 
But also, warm, witty, generous and magnanimous. 
At this fraught moment, in which Canada is facing existential threats to its economy and political sovereignty from the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, John Diefenbaker provides a historical example of an idealistic, impassioned political leader who was a fierce, unrepentant Canadian nationalist, and refused to capitulate or bend the knee to American hegemony. 
 

Evan Balgord - Executive Director of the Canadian Anti- Hate Network

The Far Right is having a moment. Some might even say it’s on the march. Seven EU member states including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within government. The Far Right’s footprint seems to be spreading around the world.
In the summer of 2024, the far right had strong showings in the European parliament elections.  Following the federal election in Germany in February 2025 the populist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany Party or AFD is now the second largest party in the German parliament.
In early June 2025 Poland’s nationalist conservative   presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki, described by commentators as being part of the radical right, surprised many by pulling off a narrow election victory.
According to the authors of the book “The Great Right North,” Far Right activism is also on the rise in Canada. They point to the growth of Far-right groups like “La Meute” and “Pegida Canada” that, they claim, have attracted tens of thousands of followers across the country. Joining me now to discuss the state of the Far right and White nationalist groupings in Canada is Evan Balgord. He’s the executive director of the Canadian Anti-hate Network. 

Sean Speer – The State of the Conservative Party and the Future of Conservatism in Canada

Sean Speer is an academic, policy analyst influencer, public commentator, and guide, described as one of the brightest intellectual lights in Canada’s Conservative firmament. During the government of Stephen Harper, he was a senior policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for the Finance and Treasury Board portfolio. He was Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Director of Policy and later worked at the Fraser Institute as Director of the Centre for Fiscal Studies. Sean
Speer is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and an editor- at large at The Hub a Conservative-leaning news and commentary website that he helped found in 2021.

Omar El Akkad - Speaking Truths about Gaza - Rebuking the West's Complicity & Double-talk

Omar El Akkad is a Canadian writer and journalist who has neither ducked nor run for cover.
He hasn’t averted his eyes or closed his ears or his heart to the suffering unfolding on our tv screens, tablets and smartphones in real time.
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1982. He grew up in Qatar settled in Canada as a teenager and graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He now lives in the the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His books include the award-winning novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Both were finalists in CBC’s Canada Reads and winners of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. His latest book is called “One Day Everyone will have always been against this” and it addresses what has been transpiring in Israel, Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2023 and long before…

Leilani Farha - Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing

Leilani Farha spends much of her time thinking about ways to make housing more accessible and affordable for people everywhere. She’s a Canadian lawyer and human rights activist who for six years between 2014-2020, was the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. In 2019 she was the subject of an award-winning documentary called Push about the unaffordability of housing worldwide and the impacts of financialization on housing security. Leilani Farha is currently the Global Director of the Shift. A human rights organization focusing on housing, finance andclimate.